I don’t believe that any of these generals—Paxton, Milley, or Gorenc—takes pride in admitting this sorry state of affairs because it is essentially an admission of failure. Duty nonetheless dictates that they tell it like it is. They’re playing with the hand they were dealt and I doubt anyone else could do it better.

It doesn’t help that their commander-in-chief pretends not to hear what they’re saying. Just two months ago, President Obama delivered a State of the Union address in which he pooh-poohed the very idea that our armed forces are languishing in disrepair. Said Obama: “I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.” (Emphasis added.)

What a dolt. Surely he can’t believe that our military’s combat effectiveness can be measured in dollars spent? The measure of any endeavor is always results. His argument reminds me that, once upon a time, Mr. Obama was just a left-wing community activist. He still sounds like one.

Didn’t President Obama consult his top military leaders before including that remark in his speech? If he had they would have told him what they told Congress last week—namely, that the military is woefully unprepared. If we rule out the possibility that he’s never had such a conversation with the brass then we must conclude that he flippantly dismissed what they told him, probably with the same nifty factoid about military expenditures that he used at the State of the Union. Obama clearly didn’t listen to his advisors because they told him something he didn’t want to hear.

Or is there another possibility? Could it be that this president knows quite well how much the military has atrophied under his administration and he’s pleased with it? In order to prove such a claim definitively I would have to get into his mind to determine his true motives, which I obviously can’t do. There’s nothing in his public statements to indicate a hostility toward the military, though there’s enough anecdotal evidence to indicate a casual disrespect, such as his now infamous latte salute and the completely unreasonable rules of engagement he imposed on combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a man with no military experience and it shows.

He’s also the president who opened all combat positions to women. That alone would have been a mistake but of course his administration exerted downward pressure to get women into elite units such as the Army Rangers without actually requiring them to meet standards. After two women “passed” the Ranger course this summer, it came to light that they had received special assistance and unlimited opportunities to reattempt portions of the course that they had failed. “We were under huge pressure to comply,” said one Ranger instructor. “It was very much politicized.”

It seems that Obama likes the military only as a production line for historic “firsts” that he can take credit for. He’s the guy who gave us the first two female Rangers and the first openly homosexual service secretary, Eric K. Fanning. Just last week Obama nominated another “first”—the first female combatant commander, Air Force General Lori Robinson. I’m not necessarily saying that General Robinson is unqualified for the job though the fact that she was nominated by Obama, a man of unspeakably poor judgement, suggests that she’s probably a hot mess. I am however saying that if she’s truly the best candidate for the job then her sex shouldn’t matter. But to Barack Obama, it matters quite a bit because her nomination provided another “first” for his presidential legacy. Isn’t that what the military is for?

If you want to know what Barack Obama thinks about the military, look to the man he claimed as a mentor in his first memoir “Dreams From My Father”—Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Davis first became a member of the CPUSA during the Stalin era, as well as during the time of the Comintern when all communist parties around the globe met periodically in Moscow to receive their marching orders. Davis was a determined opponent of US foreign policy, especially the Marshall Plan and NATO, and he hated the US military which he saw as a global force for evil. To believe that the president doesn’t share even a hint of this hostility toward our armed forces is to say that Barack the protégé learned nothing from Frank the mentor, a conclusion I find plainly absurd.

If that doesn’t convince you, look at some of his other influences, such as his pastor, the anti-American firebrand Jeremiah Wright, as well as his heroes Saul Alinsky, Desmond Tutu, and the communist terrorist Nelson Mandela. Obama has always admired people who hate US military power but we’re supposed to believe that he doesn’t.

Our military has fallen on tough times and it will be up to the next president to rehabilitate it. Whether the harm that has befallen our military is the result of mere neglect or actual malfeasance is difficult to determine though I wouldn’t rule out the latter.

Columnist and playwright Jim Grimsley penned an editorial last week in the Los Angeles Times that accused white people—all white people—of being racist. Grimsley, who is white and grew up in Georgia at the tail-end of the Jim Crow era, railed against the cluelessness of white America on the issue of race. Even white people who consider themselves enlightened on racial issues, he argues, are often unaware of the racism that lurks within their own hearts. “…I have found that black people are all too aware that progress on racial issues has hardly moved forward at all, while white people are nearly as blind to their racism as ever,” he wrote.

I wish Grimsley had been clearer on one point—that is, whether white racism is cultural or genetic. Within the space of the same sentence he seems to blame both nature and nurture for white racism. Grimsely writes: “…[T]hese are symptoms of the insanity of white culture and our refusal to understand that racism is part of our makeup — each and every one of us, north, south, east and west — from cradle to grave.”

At first glance he seems to be blaming culture; he even identifies it by name. But look closer. If culture were to blame there would surely be exceptions to the rule because it couldn’t be “part of our makeup.” Learned behavior can be unlearned. Furthermore, no one would be racist in the cradle, as he asserts, because infants haven’t yet undergone socialization. Babies are blank slates upon which anything can be written.

The idea that white people are irredeemably racist is central to the social justice movement. All white people are racist, even good white liberals. White liberals may be a little better than some backwoods sharecropper with tobacco juice running down his shirt; but not by much. And they’re obtuse to boot.

Enter Tim Wise, another white southerner. He may be America’s best known “anti-racist activist” and he’s pretty extreme in his beliefs. Wise has made a career out of countering anti-black racism, most of which is entirely fictional, with anti-white racism. Even Wise admits to harboring certain racist tendencies though he blames it on growing up in a “white supremacist” culture. He nonetheless believes, despite his efforts to be the best friend black people have ever had, that he has internalized certain racist attitudes. And no, he isn’t talking about racist attitudes towards whites though that would at least be true. According to Tim Wise, icon of “anti-racism,” even Tim Wise can’t claim to have washed away the stain of racism. Without exception, all white people must be racist.

Allow me to depart here with most conservatives and say that white people, all white people, are at least a little racist. But so are all black people, all yellow people, and all brown people because racism is part of the human condition.

I don’t mean to imply that anyone is born with animus toward a particular race or ethnic group. At birth we don’t even know what racial or ethnic groups are. Yet contained within human nature are two of the necessary ingredients for racism—tribalism and generalization, without which racism would not exist. Let’s examine these.

Tribalism is the urge to care more about the group you belong to than the group that you don’t. This isn’t always negative but it can be. Tribalists don’t really care if The System offers maximum fairness to all people. They just want the best result for people who look, speak, and act like they do. This usually results in a lot of huddling together in groups—think of BET, FUBU, and the United Negro College Fund. Tribalists will, for example, take offense at the slogan “All Lives Matter” because to them only the lives of people with shared racial characteristics have value. They won’t admit that “Black Lives Matter” is chauvinistic, but who would?

It should be noted here that this attitude has existed in all time and in all places. The only societies in history that have even tried to resist the tribalist urge are modern Western societies—this is, white societies of the post-World War II era. If you regard tribalism as negative–and in most cases I do—then Europe and North America are actually paragons of virtue. Colorblindness is an idea that modern Westerners have strived for even if they have not perfectly achieved it. Within those societies, it’s the white majority that has been the most willing to suppress their instincts. Other races seem less enthused about colorblindness. They have demanded and received preference which they will cling to from now until eternity.

The second trend is generalization. Generalizations are mental shortcuts that come with certain pitfalls because they aren’t universally true. For example, not all Canadians like hockey but most do. In short, generalizations are useful even if they may sometimes steer us wrong. If a woman is walking home through a bad neighborhood it will help her to be on guard. She may be afraid of a young black male but not an elderly Japanese female. There’s a reason for that and it shouldn’t be dismissed as rank prejudice.

The idea that we’re born racist, something I think at least some social justice warriors would agree with as long as we’re discussing only white people, has certain ramifications. If we accept it (and I do), we must accept that racism will always exist. The war against racism can never be won but we can lose our freedom fighting it.

I’ve noticed that liberals often use human nature as an excuse for behaviors that would otherwise be rejected. If we have an urge, what’s the use of trying to suppress it? Consider homosexuality, for example, a behavior regarded as aberrant by nearly every society prior to the late Twentieth Century. Putting aside moral and religious arguments for a moment, homosexuality comes with certain health risks, particularly the male variety—rectal cancer, AIDS, gonorrhea, etc.

But don’t tell that to liberals. “Gays” are just “born that way” they argue with very little evidence. No “gay” gene has ever been found and studies indicate that children exposed to sexual abuse tend to become homosexuals. Liberals reject this notion because they believe that homosexuality is not a choice. Homosexuals therefore have no obligation to suppress their urges. Be your true to yourself, they say. Telling anyone that homosexuality is shameful is a form of abuse because it forces that person into the proverbial closet.

It’s a mystery to me how homosexuality differs from racism if they are both inborn traits. According to dogma, “gays” couldn’t stop being “gay” any more than a leopard could change his spots. But isn’t the same true of racists? If racists are born, not made, then even heavy guilt tactics won’t cure them. What’s the point of trying to make racists change? All of this “racist shaming” seems both pointless and destructive to its subjects.

As a certified “homophobe” I am often asked if “gays” choose to be “gay.” I always answer the same: yes, because people choose who they sleep with. That doesn’t satisfy the homofascists who always respond, “If being gay were a choice, who would choose it?”

They mean to imply that homosexuality carries a stiff social penalty, which it does not. Homosexuality is fashionable. Everybody’s doing it! Look at the way we celebrated Michael Sam and Jason Collins, the first openly homosexual athletes in the NFL and NBA, respectively. There’s reason to believe that Sam, a mediocre defensive lineman, would not have been drafted by the St. Louis Rams if he hadn’t announced during his senior year that he enjoys butt sex. Collins, a lackluster center, certainly wouldn’t have made the cover of Sport illustrated if he weren’t America’s first big league homosexual.

The social penalty for homosexuality is non-existent. The same cannot be said about the social penalty for racism. You can lose your job for the slightest episode of racism, real or perceived, which is really hypocritical in that everyone is at least a little racist.

A simple question demands to be answered: do people choose to be racist? If say you say no, then what’s the point of shaming them? They’re beyond reformation. If you say yes, that necessitates a follow-up question—if racism is a choice, who would choose it knowing that it would mean living life as a pariah? Certainly no one I know would knowingly accept the social penalty that comes with harboring forbidden thoughts. It must therefore be an inborn characteristic.

Have you ever noticed that whenever liberals say that something won’t happen, it happens? Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. Just weeks after Washington State implemented a new nondiscrimination law that protects “gender identity” a man walked into a women’s locker room at a public pool in Seattle, a possibility that liberals had pooh-poohed when passing the bill.

Other women were shocked because the man evidenced no outwardly feminine characteristics. This was not a dude carrying a purse and wearing a miniskirt; this was a dude who looked like a dude. He calmly began to undress in front of the women who quickly reported him to staff. When he was asked to leave he reportedly said, “The law has changed and I have a right to be here.” He later returned at a time when several young girls were changing for swim practice.

The police were not called and the unidentified man was therefore not arrested. No surprise there; what would they have charged him with? The law, which opponents claim enables voyeurism, would have been on his side. All he would have had to say is that he feels himself a woman in his heart of hearts. If he had been arrested he would have been able to sue the police for wrongful detention.

Such is the insanity of these transgender “rights” laws which completely abandon the idea that maleness and femaleness are objective realities. Those are just social constructs, they argue, and they can be altered with surgery, hormone therapy, or even just a personal decision to be “true” to one’s self. In order to muddy the waters they speak of gender rather than sex, two words that were once synonymous but have recently diverged. Even transgender activists acknowledge sex as being determined by biology though they afford it little importance. It’s gender that concerns them because gender is entirely self-determined.

Nor is gender binary—an “either/or” decision between male and female. Facebook, a company always on the forefront of deviancy, allows its US-based users 51 options for defining gender including “androgynous” and “genderqueer.” Said Facebook on its “diversity” page: “When you come to Facebook to connect with the people, causes, and organizations you care about, we want you to feel comfortable being your true, authentic self. An important part of this is the expression of gender, especially when it extends beyond the definitions of just ‘male’ or ‘female.’ So today, we’re proud to offer a new custom gender option to help you better express your own identity on Facebook.”

In short, the transgender movement’s Big Idea is that no one can tell anyone else what his/her/zir gender is because it’s a personal choice. Though completely bonkers, I can see how this idea would appeal to the Left because it rejects the concept of objective reality and fetishizes self-determination.

I’ve often wondered just how far the Left will extend this principle. There must be a bridge too far but where is it?

Perhaps that bridge can be found in Ontario, Canada, where transgender “rights” have been the law of the land since 2012. Almost as soon as the law took effect, a man named Christopher Hambrook checked himself into two women’s shelters. He had to claim to “identify” as a woman in order to gain entrance but that was easy. He called himself “Jessica” and swore that he was every bit as female as the other residents. The shelters were legally obliged to agree with him. Hambrook proceeded to sexually assault several women which is exactly the scenario that opponents of these types of laws warned of.

Surely the law will be repealed now, right? There’s no indication that it will be so I guess that even the Hambrook case isn’t a bridge too far for liberals. It’s just the price we pay for “equal rights.”

Now I don’t really believe that the Left intends these laws to facilitate voyeurism or sexual assault even though that’s been the effect. What they want is for men who genuinely feel they are women to be treated as women. (And women who feel like men, of course.) They essentially want everyone to engage in a mass delusion because it makes delusional people feel better. They’re still wrong about this. Even if we could filter out the pedophiles and peeping toms from the truly gender dysphoric I’d still be against it because I’d rather not lie to myself. But as a matter of fact we can’t filter them out. If each person has full autonomy to decide whether he is male, female, or something else, then each person’s stated gender identity is sacrosanct and non-debatable. Guys like Christopher Hambrook can of course be arrested and jailed after they assault women but they can’t be preemptively barred from women’s shelters as a precautionary measure. Which is utter madness, plain and simple. I can only conclude that in their minds, protecting the delicate feelings of the mentally ill is more important than protecting women and children from pervs.

But what can we do about it? My solution is simple: stop using the transgender activists’ terms. They’re far too subjective and malleable to mean anything at all in a legal sense. I don’t care at all what “gender” you “identify” as. I care about your sex. Sex is meaningful because it is an inalterable reality written into our DNA.

Might the Left, in deference to the principle of self-determination, be willing to allow us to “identify” as anything we want? Well, almost anything. In 2015, a self-identified biracial woman named Rachel Dolezal was discovered to be entirely white which sparked a nationwide debate about racial identity and whether it’s actually fixed at birth. The incident was particularly embarrassing because Dolezal was president of her local NAACP chapter and a world-class race-baiter. Writing in Time magazine, liberal pundit and retired NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar concluded that yes, Rachel Dolezal can be black if she wants to be. Race is complex and illusory, he posits, therefore the race we “identify” with is much more important than the race we’re actually born into. It’s an exact analogue of the transgender argument transposed onto the racial issue. The only difference here is that the transgender movement differentiates between sex and gender, while race is still a solitary, unified concept.

One gets the idea from his article that Abdul-Jabbar will allow Dolezal her blackness because she’s been, in his words, a “fierce and unrelenting champion” for black people. I think he means that she’s been a racial agitator, which is the same thing in his mind. Dolezal has created or imaged no fewer than nine fake “hate crimes” against herself, the usual modus operandi of black supremacists. But would Abdul-Jabbar be so tolerant of a white kid who claimed to be black on his college application just to take advantage of the lower standards black students are required to meet? I think not, though that sounds like an excellent way to bring the racist affirmative action system crashing down. That “bridge too far” has been identified: it’s okay to feign blackness unless you plan to claim the privileges that blacks jealously guard for themselves.

Other people who “identify” as disabled are actually doing real harm to themselves. They’re called “transabled” and they feel like frauds in their fully functioning bodies. They sometimes cut off arms and legs in order to be true to themselves. Even most leftists, I think, would reject self-mutilation because it’s obviously bizarre; but is it really so different than what transgender people do to themselves in order to achieve fulfillment? It’s a different body part they’re chopping off but mutilation all the same.

Can we determine our own age? Don’t laugh, at least one gender dysphoric man from Toronto has decided that he is in fact female and six years old. “Stephonknee” (an adopted name) Wolschtt left his wife and seven kids so that he could be himself—or “herself” as media reports tag him. He has been adopted by an elderly couple who treat him exactly as they would treat any six year old girl. He spends his days coloring and wearing dresses. “I’m allowed to be exactly who I am and I don’t have to apologize or make excuses because I’m different,” said Wolschtt.

Of course, neither his maleness nor his age are subjective entities open to interpretation. They are facts. But how could someone who considers “gender” to be a personal decision draw the line at age?

Gender may be a complex issue, but it’s also meaningless if each individual can determine it for himself (or herself, zerself). It’s best then not to draft legislation that contains such useless terminology. The path back to sanity requires us to resurrect the idea of sex, an objective reality not open to interpretation. Should we fail to do this we will only slide further into madness.

Ann Coulter’s got a crush and his name is The Donald. The Right’s queen of wit has fallen head over heels for Donald Trump, the candidate who forced the GOP to talk about the issue of illegal immigration.

My feelings about Coulter are mixed. I enjoy her columns and always buy her books when they come out, even if I don’t always agree with everything she says. She, like Trump, revels in shocking liberals, which goes a long way toward explaining the attraction. Admittedly, it’s not difficult to shock liberals, who take offense at things like colorblind hiring, the American flag, and virtue. I admire Coulter’s sass but I frequently question her judgement when it comes to picking political candidates. Over the years she’s endorsed Ron Paul, Chris Christie, and Mitt Romney; all duds in my book.

But never before has she been so enthusiastic about a candidate as she has been about Donald Trump because he speaks to the issue that she cares the most about—illegal immigration. It’s an issue that many Americans, particularly many conservative Republicans, care about. Until recently we have had no audience in Washington for our concerns. Neither party seems willing to crack down on rampant lawlessness and one party clearly encourages it by portraying the lawbreakers as victims. They told us that no one should have to “live in the shadows;” as if illegal immigrants weren’t boasting of their lawbreaking on television and being invited to the White House. Where are these “shadows” liberals are always talking about? They certainly can’t be found in our two hundred plus “sanctuary cities” where federal law is null and void.

Many of us thought that Washington would hear the cries of “enough is enough” when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost a primary to Dave Brat on account of Cantor’s go-along-to-get-along attitude toward illegal immigration. Apparently Washington didn’t hear us. I count myself among those Americans concerned with illegal immigration, and for that I will give Mr. Trump his rightful kudos. If he hadn’t run the other candidates would be talking about every other issue except that one. Even so, he’s a phony and a blowhard so he won’t get my vote in the primary or the general election.

Unfortunately, Ann Coulter has become a single issue pundit, focusing her attention for the better part of two years on illegal immigration. Her excellent book “Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole” is filled with startling facts about the Mexification (and Somalification, Hmongification) of America; but it also happens to be repetitive. It’s more of the same material she’s used in her columns since about 2014.

As someone who’s read “Adios, America” and most of her columns, I think I can summarize her views on illegal immigration, which I mostly agree with. According to Coulter, no other issue matters because if Democrats bring in poor immigrants by the boatload they will sweep to power and shape policy on everything including guns, crime, taxes, and the culture wars. As the saying goes, if immigrants and their children were destined to vote Republican even Harry Reid would join the Minutemen to defend our border. What motivates the Democrats is not compassion for the downtrodden but naked self-interest. Coulter explained her position in an interview with the Daily Signal’s Genevieve Wood: “It’s the only issue because once we have only Americans voting again we can win those other issues. If we keep dumping—and oh my gosh, if amnesty goes through well then it’s over overnight. As soon as they become voters, that’s 30 million voters for the Democrats.”

In the 2016 Republican primary Coulter has of course supported the candidate who forced the other candidates to take a stand on her pet issue. But I think Ann Coulter ought to temper her enthusiasm. Her position, if I understand it correctly, is that Trump has been consistent on the issue while the others are either amnesty shills (Bush and Kasich) or they only decided to get tough because Trump’s candidacy forced them to. As she wrote in her most recent column, “GOP Baffled as Voters Rally to Popular Candidate”: “Trump is the first presidential candidate in 50 years who might conceivably: (1) deport illegal aliens, (2) build a wall, (3) block Muslim immigration, (4) flout political correctness, (5) bring manufacturing home, and (6) end the GOP’s neurotic compulsion to start wars in some godforsaken part of the world…There is not another candidate who agrees with Trump on all these positions. Maybe one issue, but not all of them — and if it’s immigration, they would be lying.”

Maybe, but Trump would be lying too. Coulter appears not to know this, as she told Charles Cooke of National Review: “He has certainly been consistent on caring about illegal immigration.” Donald Trump has not been consistent on the issue of illegal immigration. He’s a flip-flopper, a fact that should surprise no one because Trump is the ultimate political chameleon. He’ll say whatever he has to say to secure power. In that regard he’s not unlike Barack Obama…with fewer scruples.

In 2013 Donald Trump met with some “DREAMers” (illegal aliens) and a pair of Democratic strategists at his penthouse in New York, even posing for pictures with them. They told him sob stories about parents being deported, a yarn I find very hard to believe because immigration enforcement is a joke and has been for a long time. There are no recordings of the meeting but the “DREAMers” all seem to agree that Trump was sympathetic to their cause. They say that Trump even claimed that “illegal aliens” (an accurate term that made them cringe) did landscaping for him at a golf course he owns in Miami. So the guy who employs illegal aliens—a crime in and of itself—is going to get tough on illegal immigration? Perhaps, but he’d be labeled a hypocrite if he did. And his critics would be right.

My theory is that Trump was considering a run for the White House but hadn’t yet decided which party would better serve him or which views he should pretend to hold. He doesn’t instinctively know these things because Trump has no core principles. Instead he has interests, and right now he believes that those interests are best served by focusing on this issue.

To Trump’s credit, and I don’t give him much, he has his finger on the pulse of America. He reasoned, not incorrectly, that people are sick of Obama and that he could ride the tidal wave of disgust all the way to the presidency. He zeroed in on this issue not because he gives a hoot (he doesn’t) but because he thinks that it will ultimately pay dividends, which it may. It’s just business; and Donald Trump is the consummate businessman; except for all the bankruptcies, of course.

What Ann Coulter doesn’t see is that Donald Trump fits the profile of the amnesty shill to a tee. Before he was a thorn in the side of the pro-amnesty GOP establishment he was part of that establishment; or at least he was fully qualified to be a member. He was a wealthy, secular, country club Republican who bragged of hiring illegal aliens for cripes sake! As many conservatives have argued, they can’t get the corporatist Republicans to enforce the law because they see illegal aliens as a source of cheap labor. Don’t forget that The Donald was one of those corporatist Republicans just two short years ago; and before that he was a Democrat who partied with the Clintons, praised Barack Obama, and donated to Planned Parenthood.

But surely Donald Trump will fulfill his campaign promise, right? If it suits him he will. He will of course be thinking of a second term and it might be difficult to get reelected if he angers the people who supported him the first time around, though the same could be said of a candidate like Ted Cruz, who is supposedly only jumping on Trump’s bandwagon. I would argue that Trump has jumped on Cruz’s bandwagon, a man who fought to defeat the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill.

Or maybe Trump will flip-flop again. His calculations might be a little different after the election. As his multiple bankruptcies and divorces have proven, Donald Trump thinks nothing of going back on his word. If he believed that switching sides on this issue would pave the way to a second term he’d do it; and Ann Coulter would be stiffed at the altar along with the rest of his fan club. This man has no soul.

“It’s illegal to offend people,” said the UT-Austin police officer to a Christian evangelist. The officer then proceeded to write the evangelist a citation. Yes, that actually happened in America. Thankfully, the citation was later voided and the officer received re-training.

The event occurred just off campus where two evangelists were preaching against homosexuality. According to the police officer, a student complained that he was being “verbally harassed” which in fact he was not. The whiney student, if he exists at all, was simply being exposed to words and ideas that offended him. The accusation of “verbal harassment” is the authoritarian censor’s primary weapon against our constitutional rights.

Three officers responded to the call (three!) and together the five of them then proceeded to have a conversation that was cordial but nonetheless alarming. Most of the conversation occurred between an evangelist named Joshua Borchert and a certain Officer Wormsley, who proceeded to inform Borchert that he had a duty to enforce the law; and the law, according to Wormsley, is that any speech that offends anyone is illegal. He’s apparently never heard of this other law called the US Constitution.

“We had somebody that was offended by the gestures that you were making,” said Wormsley. “And that’s our job is to make sure that that doesn’t happen because these are students that’s walking in this mall right here. I know you’re not on campus. But you’re right off campus offending students on the campus. So the job here is to write you up as a citation, disorderly conduct, for offending someone.”

Officer Wormsley later conferred with another officer, saying: “He indicates that it’s [his] first amendment, he can say what he wants, freedom of speech, but that’s not what the law says. The law says, I mean, if you offend somebody, if they want to press charges, you can’t do that.”

Perhaps the most terrifying part in the video is when Borchert asked the three police officers if they have ever issued citations for the “crime” of causing offense. “Yes,” said one cop. “Oh yes,” said another. When Borchert asked what fine the judge might impose the officer replied: “We write so many, I can’t answer that question for you.” That alone should tell you that this is not an isolated incident.

Nor is it confined to UT-Austin. Across the fruited plain, on campuses both public and private, universities strictly regulate student speech. The first amendment watchdog group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) annually rates colleges on their free speech policies using a color-coded system. A green rating means that a college adheres to constitutional free speech protections, a yellow light means that a school has at least one ambiguous policy that encourages abuse and arbitrary application, and a red light means that a school blatantly violates its students’ rights. UT-Austin received a red rating in FIRE’s most recent report, as did 49.3 percent of the 440 campuses studied. Only 5 percent got a green rating.

I wish I could say that I’m shocked by this but I’m not. College campuses are hostile environments for all of our first amendment rights but especially to our right to free speech. It wasn’t that long ago when I was studying at a large public university where I witnessed with my own eyes an utter disregard for freedom of speech. Within my first few weeks at the University of Massachusetts I was stunned to see a list of banned words hanging in a dormitory. This isn’t Communist China, I thought; public universities can’t just ban words. Oh but they do.

The list was composed entirely of “homophobic” slurs, including one which I hadn’t previously known to be “homophobic” at all. That word was “buttmunch,” which I had never before associated with homosexuals. I have since learned that munching butt is a common practice among male homosexuals which explains why they suffer from so many intestinal parasites. They eat a lot of feces, you know? So I learned something new that day—I’m not allowed to say “buttmunch” because it offends people who munch butt.

But really, who are they to tell me what words I may use? “Homophobic” slurs are absolutely covered by the first amendment, full stop. The whole purpose of the first amendment is to protect offensive speech. But alas, UMass received a red rating from FIRE and for good reason; it’s basically a gulag on a picturesque New England campus.

It’s important to note however that the campus authoritarians are not just cops and administrators. The students are cool with being told what to say and they won’t hesitate to rat you out for thought crimes. Censorship is accepted practice and no one bats an eyelash. A McLaughlin & Associates survey of college students completed in 2015 found that 51 percent of students favored campus speech codes while a mere 36 percent dissented. Thirty-five percent said that the Constitution does not protect “hate speech,” an imprecise term that basically means whatever liberals hate hearing. Among self-described liberals 30 percent said that the first amendment was “outdated.”

Free speech is all too often perceived as a shield for bigots to hide behind—which it is, of course, though I don’t mean to imply that everyone accused of bigotry by the campus authoritarians is guilty as charged. “Bigotry” is an all-purpose word used to describe Orwellian thought crimes, most of which are not bigoted at all. It nonetheless protects authentic bigotry too. There’s absolutely no need to parse out the difference between genuine bigoted speech and non-bigoted speech because both are constitutionally protected. Yet campus authoritarians don’t want anyone to have a shield to protect themselves so they attempt to delegitimize first amendment protections as somehow cowardly; as if standing against majority opinion doesn’t take guts. “Quit hiding behind the first amendment!” they shout. Why the heck shouldn’t someone hide behind the first amendment? That’s what it’s for—protection.

Part of the reason that censorship is so rampant on college campuses is that people are by nature selfish. They want protection for themselves but won’t extend it to others. The average campus liberal doesn’t appreciate the value of free speech because it never occurs to him that he might someday be the purveyor of an unpopular idea. In all likelihood, he never will need constitutional protections because, by the standards of his campus, he is in fact a very conventional thinker. He is a member of the “in group” who feels entitled to gag the “out group.”

He reasons, not incorrectly, that censorship only affects the other guy. But he errs in assuming that it only affects bad people with very wrong ideas. In this regard he shares a lot in common with the seventeenth century Catholic theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, a very intolerant member of the French aristocracy who once said: “I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong.”

That type of thinking was common in Europe before the Enlightenment but it’s anathema to the ideals that America was founded upon. Granted, America has often failed to live up to those ideals, from Comstockery to official censorship during the Civil War and both world wars, if only because ideals are things we strive for even when they are not perfectly achieved.

But we aren’t even striving for that ideal anymore; at least not on college campuses. The very notion that people can just speak their minds is considered dangerous in and of itself. It’s a thought too scary for a generation raised in safe zones to contemplate. Ideas must be controlled!

My only hope is that the Constitution will protect us and someday this will all be straightened out, perhaps by some watershed court decision. But I doubt it. Our constitutional rights are only as good as the public officials who interpret and enforce them. I have little faith that tomorrow’s judges, cops, and college administrators will allow the first amendment to be anything more than dead words on a page, hypocritically maintained in theory while endlessly violated in practice. After all, the students who clamor for “safe spaces” today will someday be the public officials whose job it is to safeguard our freedoms. This is truly the first authoritarian generation reared on American soil. Should they fail to mature in their appreciation for the first amendment our freedom will be lost.

“I’m really good at killing people,” Barack Obama once allegedly said. The origin of the quote is the 2013 book “Double Down” by veteran political journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, who cite unnamed Obama aides as their source. The two reporters have journalistic credits even a liberal would respect—The New Yorker, The Economist, and MSNBC, to name a few.

Some people choose not to give the quote credence because its source is anonymous and it wasn’t caught on tape. Skepticism surrounding anonymous quotes is of course understandable though I surmise that most doubters have political motives. People who are still high on Hope and Change™ will surely guffaw at the suggestion that their man would say such a callous thing.

Take it or leave it, I don’t care. It’s a true statement even if he never said it.

Though the Obama aides say that he was speaking of drone warfare when he bragged about his death-dealing, his prowess in the field of killing people is hardly limited to Hellfire missiles. Take, for example, the recent discovery of a Fast & Furious-linked .50 caliber rifle at the criminal hideout of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was arrested in Mexico on January 8th. The rifle, which was capable of shooting down a helicopter, found its way into the drug lord’s hands through a still opaque program that allowed American guns to cross the border into Mexico with the full knowledge of the Department of Justice. Federal officials have not precluded the possibility that other weapons found at El Chapo’s hideout will be traced back to the ill-conceived Operation Fast & Furious. It’s good to know that our DOJ is playing a role, even if only through willful negligence, in arming the most notorious narco-gangster since Pablo Escobar.

When I first read about El Chapo’s .50 caliber rifle I was immediately reminded of Mr. Obama’s unilateral gun control executive orders and the associated town hall meetings which were designed to leave the false impression that he sought the American people’s input. The hypocrisy of it all was stunning. A man who armed El Chapo shouldn’t have a say in American citizens’ second amendment rights. We’re not the problem. He is. This is a man who stated “I do not believe people should be able to own guns” and praised Australia as the model for gun laws. Australia does not permit private citizens to own guns so I must conclude that Obama supports an outright ban. He is not just tweaking the system a little to make sure that underworld figures don’t get guns. To the contrary, he’s facilitating the transaction. On the other hand, he wants your gun—even if you’re a model citizen.

Unfortunately, some of those guns decided to come back across the border. A Fast & Furious gun was used to murder US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010. Terry was engaged in a firefight with drug traffickers. El Chapo’s men? Perhaps. In 2014, two Muslim men drove from Phoenix to Garland, Texas, to shoot up a “Draw Mohammed” contest. The men were stopped in their tracks by armed Texas lawmen before they could kill anyone, thank goodness. When the dust settled it was determined that one of their weapons was a Fast & Furious gun.

As a consequence of Obama’s and Holder’s gunwalking operation, our government has armed Muslim terrorists, cop killers, and the biggest drug lord in the world. Pretty good at killing people? Don’t be modest, Mr. President. You’re the best.

But Obama’s guns aren’t just found in Mexico or in the border states. They can also be found across the Middle East and North Africa. During the 2011 war that overthrew Libyan dictator Kadafi, the Obama Administration secretly approved arms shipments from Qatar to various militant groups. After green-lighting the shipments, the Administration was shocked—shocked!—to learn that some of the weapons had wound up in the hands of Islamist fighters. From a New York Times article by James Risen et al.: “The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were ‘more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam’ than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.”

These groups must have been even more stridently Islamist than the Muslim Brotherhood which the administration considered to be a moderate player in the Arab Spring. They were surely on par with al-Qaeda which I think the Obama Administration still considers extreme though that might change before the week’s end. Considering the fact that most of the anti-Kadafi groups were some flavor of Islamist, it stretches credulity to think that the Obama Administration was just naïve. Or were they? In some minimally plausible scenario, the Obama Administration might have been criminally stupid. But I doubt it. In any case, the bulk of Libya’s revolutionary foot soldiers were undisciplined teenaged boys in pickup trucks. Arming them and then hoping for the best was a predictable foreign policy disaster.

The funny thing about guns is that once they are handed out like participation trophies they cannot so easily be recalled. Where are those guns today? No one knows. They might have been used to kill four Americans in Benghazi a year after the coup concluded. Just speculation? I’m sure Obama’s defenders would say that though it should be remembered that the guys who overran our consulate made a getaway because they won. No one was able to check the serial numbers on their guns so the mystery remains unsolved. But is it so difficult to believe that some of those guns supplied with US approval might have found their way into the hands of the terrorists who attacked our consulate? I say no.

Once loose, these guns grew legs and crossed borders. According to the same New York Times article: “Some of the arms since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department official said.”

Super! According to Glen Johnson of the Los Angeles Times in an article about the Malinese rebels: “Since the beginning of last year’s insurgency against longtime Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, weapons have streamed out of Libya, looted from depots and sold on the black market. Difficult to track and impossible to quantify, they move in many directions.”

Let’s not forget Syria. Some of the Qatari guns ended up there as well and that doesn’t include those weapons provided directly by the US government. In 2013, NBC News reported that the US was providing moderate Syrian fighters with $2.5 million per month, rations, radios, and would soon be providing them with weapons as well. Even if this army was “moderate” as its leaders claimed, and I doubt that it was, their weapons proved difficult to control.

Another failed Obama initiative that nonetheless introduced more weapons into Syria was the CIA-sponsored program for training mercenaries. Many of the guerillas—sixty in all, trained at the obscene cost of $500 million—quickly disappeared once in enemy territory with the military hardware provided to them by our government. Desertion is a possibility. ISIS captured or killed many others and likely still has their weapons.

Barack Obama really is adept at killing people. He’s killed a lot of people “by accident,” I suppose, though all of his accidents were easily foreseen and easily avoidable. He nonetheless lectures the rest of us about our guns.

If you got your degree from the University of California, you might want to demand a refund. A newly surfaced video, recorded in October, shows Professor Ross Avila of UC-Merced teaching his class that 90% of terrorism in this country is carried out by “white Caucasian men.” I think he meant to say “white Christian men,” though it’s possible the professor doesn’t understand redundancy.

Avila was trying to demonstrate to his class that people use mental shortcuts when thinking about complex issues such as terrorism. Implied in his statement, of course, is the idea that most Americans’ mental shortcuts amount to blaming religious and racial minorities for what is really, according to Avila’s made up statistic, a problem confined almost entirely to white men. This nonsense is gospel in left-wing circles.

“I’m not saying that white men are evil, but that is what we should be thinking about,” said Avila. “Usually these are people who are religiously motivated and politically conservative.”

So now Avila has added two more demographic traits to his description. By his use of the word “usually” he implies that more than half of white male terrorism is also “religiously motivated” and conservative in nature. According to the professor, 90% of terrorist incidents are committed by white men, and some unspecified quantity more than half is religiously motivated and conservative. White, male, politically conservative, religiously-motivated terrorism must therefore comprise more than 45% and less than 90% of all terrorism in the United States.

But he’s not saying that white men are evil. Those are just the facts, you see, and he’s a dispassionate observer.

Professor Avila pulled all of those statistics out of his backside. Only a handful of terrorist acts are committed by perps who fit the entirety of Avila’s description. Keep in mind, it isn’t good enough to fit one or two characteristics. For Avila’s stats to be correct he would have to show a plethora of terrorist acts carried out by people who are white, male, politically conservative, and religiously motivated. The only acts of terrorism I could find that fit Avila’s description were a few small-scale incidents of anti-abortion terrorism.

Such incidents shouldn’t be hard to find, of course. Non-Hispanic whites made up 69% of the population in the 2010 census, and males slightly less than half of that. Approximately seven in ten Americans self-identify as Christian and nine out of ten believe in God. Thirty-eight percent of Americans describe themselves as politically conservative, the largest self-identifying political group. So if majority groups are carrying out the majority of terrorism in this country that shouldn’t be a surprise. But they aren’t.

Luckily, Avila offered an anecdote to illustrate his point that white dudes are dangerous and the rest of us are bigots because we don’t realize it. He described an incident that apparently happened “about a month ago” (which would have been September 2015), when a right-wing white guy took an AK-47 to the State Capitol building in Austin, Texas, and fired off sixty rounds before being arrested. He must have been a poor shot because no one was injured. “I think he was Christian,” said the professor. “In fact, I know he was Christian because it was something about ‘the state claimed it was God’s law’ and stuff.” The professor then asked the class how many students had heard of this incident. Only one hand went up, which was supposed to “prove” that there was some kind of media blackout surrounding the Great Texas Capitol Shoot-em-up of 2015.

That one student was certainly lying because this incident never happened. But think about how implausible his story is for a moment. How does one fire sixty rounds in a crowded building without hitting anyone? A blind man would have killed at least a few people. And how does one go on a sustained shooting spree in a government building teeming with cops and manage to fire sixty rounds before being stopped? Avila’s story is absurdly absurd.

When Avila was contacted by the College Fix he insisted that in fact the incident had happened, though the details were slightly different. The real story is this—a man staged an attack on a sidewalk outside a county courthouse in Georgia using an AR-15 and some crudely made bombs. It happened in 2014 not 2015. The shooter was quickly shot dead though not before wounding a sheriff’s deputy. The shooter, Dennis Marx, had been arrested on gun charges and for possessing marijuana with the intent to distribute. He believed that the justice system was giving him a raw deal. He also belonged to the anti-government Sovereign Citizen movement, which is certainly right-wing, though I’d guess he just wanted the government to stop messing with his ganja. I have found no indication that Marx was a religious man and even if he were that wouldn’t make it “religiously motivated.”

My theory is that Avila, when confronted with his lie, attempted to find some incident somewhere that sounded like the incident he described and this was the best he could do. Dennis Marx is the professor’s shining example of a white, male, politically conservative, religiously-motivated terrorist. Or maybe he was just the closest thing the professor could find on the internet.

Liberals are downright obsessed with conservative white Christian terrorists, so obsessed in fact that they try to mold every incident of terrorism into what they want it to be. The liberal media attempted to link both the Tucson and Aurora shootings to the Tea Party despite zero evidence. After the Boston Marathon bombing, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry shrieked that the bombers were “literally Caucasian!” because they supposedly hailed from the Caucasus Mountains. (One brother was born there, the other wasn’t.) Though racial categories are often hazy, I don’t know anyone who would have considered the Tsarnaev brothers white—which is what Harris-Perry was implying—before they started killing people. In any case, their race didn’t drive them to terrorism; their religion did. These guys were Muslims and their religion was not incidental.

Even anti-Christian terrorists can be counted as Christians if liberals decide that it makes a better story–and they always do. Liberal commentator Tavis Smiley actually said that Christians “kill people every day in this country.” When asked to cite examples, he quipped: “Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that’s what Columbine is — I could do this all day long.”

If Smiley wants to educate himself on the Columbine Massacre I would recommend Dave Cullen’s superbly researched book “Columbine,” which I found to be even-handed and credible. He would learn that the killers were not Christians.

Eric Harris was very much an atheist, even an anti-theist, and he recorded videos of himself before the attack in which he mocked the faith of his soon-to-be victims. On the day of the attack, Harris wore a t-shirt that read “NATURAL SELECTION,” a reference to his Darwinist outlook. Harris was fixated on the idea that some people are less fit than others and should be removed from the gene pool. He was just speeding the process along.

Dylan Klebold’s religious beliefs are bit more complicated. Raised by liberal baby-boomer parents, Dylan had little religious foundation. The Klebolds gave church a try for a short time when Dylan was a young child though they didn’t stick with it. His journal revealed a tortured young man who believed in good and evil, light and darkness, though that alone did not make him a Christian.

The two killers demonstrated their anti-Christian bigotry on the day of the massacre. One story that Cullen found lacking in credibility is that a Christian student named Cassie Bernall was interrogated about her religious beliefs before Eric Harris shot her under a table in the library. Her family and her church took the story and ran with it. According to Cullen, they have not wanted to give up their belief that Cassie was a Christian martyr.

But Cullen concludes that the story was likely a case of mistaken identity. The Christian girl in question was probably Val Schnurr, who had already been sprayed with a shotgun. When she cried out, bleeding, “Oh my God, oh my God, don’t let me die!” Dylan Klebold asked her, mockingly, if she believed in God. She said yes. “Why?” he replied. She said that that’s the way she was raised. He loaded another shell and was about to finish her off when he got distracted and moved on. Cullen believes that some of the people in the library that day misperceived or misremembered that incident, likely because they were hiding under tables and in a panicked state of mind.

But Tavis Smiley is convinced that Christians commit acts of terrorism “every day” in this country. His only cited example was actually anti-Christian terrorism and it happened in 1999. Surely, if these incidents happen “every day” he should be able to come up with something better and more recent than Columbine.

I’m sure that someone will be able to locate a terrorist incident that matches Professor Avila’s description, thus “vindicating” his lurid imagination. But will even one or two incidents ever amount to the epidemic that liberals like to imagine? Is that number anywhere near 45%, which the professor clearly implied? No, but it helps liberals to talk constantly about a fraction of terrorists incidents, carried out by people liberals loathe, in order to distract us from the other incidents.

This New Year’s Eve was a lot less fun in Europe than in previous years as violence and threats of violence put a damper on the party atmosphere. Fireworks were cancelled in Brussels for fear of an imminent terrorist attack which precipitated the arrest of two members of a North African motorcycle club. In Munich, two train stations were evacuated when officials received intelligence of an imminent ISIS suicide attack. And in three German cities—Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Cologne—mobs of men, reportedly of “Arab or North African origin,” allegedly attacked female partygoers.

This is the new Europe. It’s not going to get better.

Cologne stood out among the cities plagued by predatory mobs for the sheer quantity of mayhem on display. As many as a thousand men allegedly robbed, groped and even raped women in and around the main train station and gothic cathedral. One hundred seventy criminal complaints were made, 120 of which had a “sexual angle.” Thirty-one men, a tiny fraction of the estimated one thousand, have been arrested. Eighteen of them are “asylum-seekers.” Not a single widow or orphan was found among them, and apparently none was named Hans or Franz.

The government’s response had been, shall we say, inadequate. On January 1st, a police press release called the New Year’s Eve celebrations “peaceful,” which suggests an official cover-up. When the government was finally willing to admit that something had happened, they still seemed to be in damage control mode. Ralf Jaeger, the Interior Minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia said that, “What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.” Oh, I see—so the people expressing their outrage online are at least as awful the wild hyenas perpetrating sexual violence. He isn’t sure if the online commenters are more awful but they must be equally awful. A more absurd false equivalence has never been drawn.

But the award for the most obtuse public official in this whole affair (besides Angela Merkel of course) goes to Cologne’s pro-asylum mayor, Henriette Reker, who just couldn’t stop putting her foot in her mouth. She originally said that there was “no reason to suspect that they are refugees.” We now know that many of them are, but can we blame her for not wanting to jump to conclusions? Yes. You’d have to be a fool to think that among the thousand or so men, all of whom were obviously not far removed from the Middle East or North Africa, there wasn’t a single one of the 1.1 million “refugees” admitted in 2015. Police officers report that one of the hooligans said, “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs. Merkel invited me.” Another man is said to have torn up his asylum papers in front of police and bragged that he could get more in the morning.

Mayor Reker also angered the public with remarks that she surely meant to be helpful but were nonetheless alarming. She told women that they should follow a “code of conduct” if they wanted to avoid being sexual assaulted and advised women against succumbing to a “celebratory mood”—which I think used to be allowed on New Year’s Eve. As a strategy for not getting sexually assaulted Frau Reker told women to stick together with girlfriends and to “make sure yourself you don’t look to be too close to people who are not known to you, and to whom you don’t have a trusting relationship.”

And some people think that mass immigration reduces social cohesion! Wherever did they get an idea like that?

Not only are Reker’s suggestions insulting but they’re also ineffective. One alleged victim of sexual assault, an 18-year old female who gave her name only as Michelle, says that she was out for the evening with ten of her girlfriends when they encountered a pack of drunken men that she estimates to have numbered between twenty and thirty. What were eleven young women going to do against thirty men?

Then there’s the racism angle. Reker’s comments weren’t overtly racist but “dog whistles” never are. It sounds as if she’s enjoining white German women to avoid swarthy Middle Eastern males. That’s raaaaaacist! It also happens to be pretty good advice though it wouldn’t have prevented this attack and the suggestion would also be a lot easier to follow if the swarthy Middle Eastern men weren’t in the white German women’s country in the first place. As more and more refugees arrive, it will be increasingly difficult to find any sanctuary from these shady characters. They will be everywhere, if they aren’t already.

The real tragedy of Reker’s “code of conduct” is the sense of resignation that hovers over it like a noxious cloud. Though the mayor says that such a thing should never happen again, her advice suggests that women should understand that extra precautions have to be taken in the new Germany, soon to be the post-German Germany. If women didn’t already understand this we can only blame their leaders and their media who assured them that Germany could absorb a practically limitless number of immigrants without changing its character. Poor girls, how could they be so naïve? They actually believed they could go out on New Year’s Eve, even allow themselves to enjoy the “celebratory mood” as they had on previous New Year’s Eves, without being ravaged by drunken animals.

But those days are over. This is the New Normal.

I’ll bet that a lot of those women miss the Old Normal. I do too. I spent three years living in Germany and came to love the city of Cologne. I’ve been to the train station many times and I think I even slept on a bench there overnight once, though I slept in a lot of train stations so I can’t be sure. These days I wouldn’t dare sleep at the Cologne train station and I’m not even a girl.

It wasn’t always this way and no one should have to accept it as a fact of life. But maybe we do have to accept it. It would take an enormous feat of political will to turn back the tide of immigrants, even to pre-2015 levels, which were already substantial. If Chancellor Angela Merkel is any indicator, the political will to really do something about this problem is lacking. In response to the sexual attacks in German cities, she said “But we must accept that the number of criminal offenses committed by young immigrants is particularly high.” Yes it’s true that immigrants’ criminality is off the charts, something she might have mentioned before committing her country to unprecedented immigration, but does that mean Germans have to accept it? The chancellor who let them all in says yes. Tomorrow’s Germany will be more Muslim than today’s and, let’s not sugarcoat it, more dangerous. So get used to it.

Resignation has already swept across neighboring France where Islamization is even more advanced. Their New Year’s Eve wasn’t exactly tranquil either; across the country, 1,067 automobiles were set ablaze. Torching cars has become something of a New Year’s Eve tradition among France’s Muslim minority. It’s a nice tradition, don’t you think? Americans sing Auld Lang Syne and kiss at midnight, French Muslims burn Peugeots. That’s just their culture—please don’t judge.

While 1,067 smoldering cars may sound like a lot, the French are getting used to it. French Interior Minister Manuel Valls was pleased that the number wasn’t higher, calling it a “positive result.” Government statistics indicate that 1,193 automobiles went up in flames the previous New Year’s Eve, so Valls is calling it a win. Obviously, Manuel Valls is a glass-half-full kind of guy but dour old pessimists like me still think France has a slight problem.

This is how societies die. Little by little they adapt to barbarism, constantly making small concessions until it all seems normal. With the passage of time people forget that it had ever been different. They even convince themselves that nostalgic memories of the “good old days” are mere figments of some racist’s imagination. They never happened!

More immigrants are coming next year. Brace yourself for New Year’s Eve 2016.

In what looked like a staged moment on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton fielded a question from a nine year-old boy at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire concerning pay inequity between the sexes. The boy, Relic Reilly, asked why his engineer father earned more than his mother, a pre-K teacher. “I think my mother is working much harder, is working more harder than my father and she deserves to have more money, like, get more money, than my father. Because she’s taking care of children and I just don’t think it’s fair.”

Mrs. Clinton used the opportunity, one that I’m pretty sure she created herself by placing the question in the boy’s mouth, to trumpet her support for yet another “equal pay for equal work” law that would make it even more illegal to pay women less than men. Paying women less than men for no other reason other than sex has been illegal at the federal level since 1963. It was made even more illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and yet again more illegal by a slew of state and local laws. Still, if Hillary Clinton is going to make her campaign into another historic “first” for women, she needs to pretend that women such as herself are oppressed—hence the fake question about a fake issue.

Coming, as this question did, on New Year’s Eve, I saw it as a fitting end to 2015, the fakest year on record. Never before has the news been dominated by so many lies, hoaxes, and counterfeits.

When 2015 began, we were already in the midst of a rape hoax at the University of Virginia, where a college student claimed to have been raped on broken glass at a frat party that never actually happened. The woman’s story kept changing and she insisted that the reporter who broke the story, Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Erdely, not contact anyone involved to verify details. Erdely actually agreed to this. When the story became absolutely indefensible, Rolling Stone retracted it and conducted an investigation to determine what had gone wrong, though the investigation itself was pretty fake in that it didn’t recommend any changes to policy and no one got fired—not even Sabrina Erdely.

That rape hoax was followed by another at Columbia University, where a female student carried a mattress around campus to protest the university’s supposed refusal to address her rape at the hands of a former lover. Actually, the university did investigate and found that her story lacked credibility. The details did not stack up and her story was almost certainly a lie, a desperate act of revenge against a man she had been infatuated with—and probably still was.

Also in January, Muslim terrorists conducted a very real attack against the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. What followed, however, was a completely insincere outpouring of support for the principle of free speech. Leaders from across Europe and the world converged in Paris to declare that they would not be bullied into censoring speech. That was a huge lie, of course, because nearly all European governments punish speech, especially speech that offends Muslims. Before, during, and after the attacks citizens were being arrested for mere words. In July, Charlie Hebdo announced that it would no longer draw Mohammed. In the future, they would self-censor.

Two thousand fifteen was also the year of fake women—by which I mean dudes who wear skirts and demand to be treated as women. Two high profile cases in American high schools involving transgender “girls” who were demanding to use the girls’ locker room were settled when the Department of Education required all schools that receive federal funds—which is nearly every public school in the country—allow students to use the locker room of their choice. Another fake woman, Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, won Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award. The husband of a former winner, NYPD policewoman Moira Smith who died in the 9/11 attacks, returned the award he had accepted on behalf of his deceased wife. “I was shocked and saddened to learn that Glamour has just named Bruce Jenner ‘Woman of the Year’…” said James Smith. “Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” Indeed.

The catchy phrase “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was found to be an utter fabrication after a lengthy investigation into the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer. Brown’s hands had not been up, he was not shot in the back, he had not been kneeling on the ground, and he was not “minding [his] own business” as Brown’s thug friend Dorian Johnson told reporters after the incident. Brown was fleeing a robbery when he attempted to murder Officer Darren Wilson with his own gun. The investigation revealed that witnesses lied in order to frame Wilson. The only element of reality in the entire Michael Brown case was all the mayhem and looting that followed.

In June a supposedly scientific study published in the peer-reviewed Science magazine was found to have been a graduate student’s concoction. The study, titled “When Contact Changes Minds” was designed to measure the degree to which entrenched opponents of same-sex marriage could be swayed by sob stories, or what they called “heartfelt, reciprocal and vulnerable conversations.” The study’s designer, PhD candidate Michael LaCour of UCLA, intended to show that mean old bigots (like me) just haven’t met many “gay” people. After a little contact with homosexuals and hearing them pour their hearts out about all the made-up grief they have to suffer through, we bigots usually relent. Or at least that’s what the study showed.

But the study was fake. The company that LaCour claimed to have hired to collect the data, Qualtrics, said that they had no record of the study. When LaCour was asked to provide his raw data he said that he had accidentally deleted the file from his computer. Another team of student at UC-Berkeley attempted to replicate LaCour’s results without success. As his story began to unravel, it became clear that Michael LaCour had fabricated the data out of whole cloth. How this study passed peer review is a mystery—unless peer review is basically a worthless ritual, as I suspect.

The news cycle was dominated for the better part of two weeks in mid-September with the tale of Ahmed Mohamed, a fourteen year old in Irving, Texas who was arrested for bringing to school what looked very much like a bomb. As it turned out, it was just a briefcase with the innards of an old Radio Shack alarm clock mounted inside. Young Mr. Mohamed claimed to have “invented” a clock, which wasn’t even true. It didn’t take long for the narrative factory to manufacture the story that Ahmed wanted—“Muslim Kid Genius Arrested by Bigoted Texans!” The story was absolute rubbish from beginning to end. Ahmed Mohamed was hoping and praying that his teachers would take the bait he was dangling before them—a briefcase with protruding wires. Prior to his arrest he was told by at least two teachers that the clock he “invented” looked like a bomb. Having succeeded in raising an alarm, he proceeded to play the victim, and is still playing the victim. Victimhood is a pretty good gig, if you can get it. Crowdfunding sites raised money for his college education. The White House, NASA, Facebook and Google all extended invitations to the supposed child prodigy. And of course—of course!—his family is suing for fifteen million dollars. Getting arrested is the best thing that ever happened to this kid.

The year ended with another disintegrating tale of anti-Muslim bigotry, also in Texas. On Christmas Day, a mosque in Houston burned down in an apparent act of arson. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) leaped on the incident as a possible bias crime. Unfortunately for CAIR, the feds arrested a devout Muslim named Gary Nathaniel Moore. He is the lead suspect. This one has self-victimization hoax written all over it.

Two thousand fifteen should be remembered as the Year of the Big Lie—the year the US Army’s once prestigious Ranger School debased the coveted Ranger tab by handing it out to women who failed to meet standards, the year in which black students posing online as angry white racists made terroristic threats to kill black people, and the year that the Supreme Court discovered a fake right to a fake marriages in the text of our Constitution.

This trend toward mendacity is truly disturbing. Are we becoming a nations of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to? I say no. We’re merely victims of a journalistic establishment that barely even pretends to report the news anymore.

Hillary Clinton says that her “not-so-secret weapon” is her husband Bill and has asked the former president to campaign for her in New Hampshire after the New Year.

Bringing in Bill to rescue a flailing Hillary actually sounds like a pretty decent strategy. It appears that she’s trying to cash in on the curious but nonetheless real phenomenon of Clinton nostalgia—Bill Clinton nostalgia, that is. People genuinely like the former president even if they can’t name a single thing he accomplished while in office.

Even so, Bill’s rescue operation reflects poorly on Hillary. It’s as if she’s saying “Yes, I know I’m a dud as a candidate—but my husband’s pretty cool, isn’t he?” Oh, yeah. He practically invented cool. William Jefferson Clinton may not be a particularly good leader but he’s certainly a masterful politician. He’s got that cool vibe that Hillary doesn’t. The Clintons have long recognized this problem and have even reached out to their friend Steven Spielberg for help, asking him to refer Hillary to an acting coach so she could learn what Bill instinctively knows. Hillary grew weary of the lessons quickly.

While Hillary’s invocation of Clinton Nostalgia is understandable it is also out of character for a progressive Democrat. Lib-Dems don’t often appeal to nostalgia and they usually chalk it up to racism when Republicans do. The good old days never were, they say. Or at least they used to say that until Hillary Clinton realized that her husband is a lot more popular than she is. Now nostalgia’s okay.

It is worth noting however that Team Clinton relied on almost exactly the opposite strategy for winning hearts and minds the last time they occupied the White House. When Bill accepted his party’s nomination at the 1996 Democratic National Convention he spoke boldly of the future, leaning heavily on his campaign’s official slogan “Building a Bridge to the 21^st Century.” In that speech, he used the word “future” ten times, the words “21^st Century” twenty-two times, and the word “children” a whopping thirty-six times! As any do-gooder will tell you, the children are the future—making the two words practically interchangeable. The speech was classic dumb-downed politics, the use of repetition and glittering generalities to hammer home one simple, emotionally-charged message: Democrats are the future, Republicans are the past.

Speaking as one of those children Bill Clinton mentioned thirty-six times—I was fifteen years old at the time of the convention—I will say that we’ve arrived at the future he spoke of…and it sucks. It’s no wonder Hillary is placing her bets on nostalgia.

Remember back before everything sucked? Yeah, my husband was president then.

So just what went wrong in the meantime? A lot of things, I suppose, though if I had to choose just two I would name 9/11 and the 2008 fiscal crisis as the most substantial. Bill Clinton bears a large portion of the responsibility for both of those events which makes me wonder why so many people seem to eagerly await his comeback tour. He’s not solely responsible for either event, of course, but he does deserve the lion’s share of blame.

The 2008 fiscal crisis was roughly thirty years in the making, beginning with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Though the CRA wasn’t quite a monstrosity at birth, it did saddle banks with an “affirmative obligation” to the meet the credit needs of the communities in which they resided. Some people thought it was unfair that a bank should operate in a community yet rarely make loans to its residents. That might sound like a raw deal until one realizes that not all communities are fiscally equal and that some communities contain a certain threshold of people who can’t or won’t pay their bills.

It was the Clinton Administration, however, that made serious changes to the CRA’s interpretation and enforcement. Backed by a 1993 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that detected racism in lending practices, the Clinton Administration tightened the screws on banks to get them to lend money more freely. The study has been widely criticized as myopic in scope, failing to consider economic disparities between races, but no matter, Clinton has his cudgel with which to beat the bankers. With the full might of the federal government behind them, regulators began demanding that banks make loans to people at high risk of defaulting. Banks sheepishly complied.

Liberals now call this “predatory lending;” as if banks actively sought out people with credit scores in the toilet and enticed them to take out loans that they would likely never repay. That’s how banks work, right?

As economist Stan Liebowitz wrote: “From the current handwringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards–at the behest of community groups and ‘progressive’ political forces.”

Things got worse when wealthier borrowers began to demand the same terms for their loans as poor people got. It was rather difficult to tell a person with good credit that he couldn’t have the same terms as someone with bad credit. Fueled by easy money from the banks, often loaned at favorable interest rates and sometimes with no down payment necessary, builders got to work adorning the American landscape with new homes.

The economy was quickly overheating, slipping into a boom that could only be followed by a bust. Most people don’t see Bill Clinton’s fingerprints all over this mess though they should. If they did, would they still be singing his praises as the man who returned prosperity to America? I doubt it.

Then there’s 9/11. Just how many chances Clinton had to kill or capture bin Laden is often debated, though Clinton himself has admitted at least one. His admission came just hours before the first plane struck the World Trade Center, while Clinton was speaking in Australia. “I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill three hundred innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”

It was a tough decision, I know, but if he had gone the other way he might have changed the course of history for the better. Clinton’s concern for (perhaps) three hundred Afghan civilians led to the slaughter of ten times that many Americans, not to mention the long, grinding war on terror that followed.

But there was likely another chance—or two? In 1995, Sudanese officials contacted the US government to discuss bin Laden’s possible deportation back to his native Saudi Arabia. “They [the Saudis] were afraid it was too much of a hot potato, and I understand where they were,” Clinton later said. He also mentioned that taking up Sudan on the offer directly was not an option: “We couldn’t indict him then because he hadn’t killed anybody in America. He hadn’t done anything to us.” Actually, bin Laden had been involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing though that was not known until 1996. Sudanese officials have also said that in 1996 they offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States directly but Clinton turned them down. Clinton has denied this. The 9/11 commission could find no evidence that any such offer was made—except for the not insignificant fact that Sudanese officials said that they made it, which is “evidence” in my book. I wonder what other evidence they were looking for? The Sudanese said they made the offer, the known perjurer Bill Clinton said they didn’t. Who are you going to believe?

There may have been other chances. Investigative journalist Richard Miniter wrote in his book “Losing bin Laden” that there were more than a dozen, including one opportunity to strike bin Laden with a missile after the USS Cole Bombing in October 2000. Collateral damage considerations precluded the strike. Madeleine Albright is quoted saying that “bombing Muslims wouldn’t be helpful at this time”. This incident may have been the same opportunity Clinton was referring to in Australia on September 11, 2001, or it may have been a separate opportunity.

And yet people still miss this guy. He’s Mr. Cool, the Rhodes scholar who smoked a little weed in college and played his sax on MTV. He gave a soaring speech about the gleaming 21^st Century—and bequeathed us the hellish reality we now inhabit. If Mr. Clinton fired up the crowds with his “bridge to the future,” Mrs. Clinton hopes to do the same with a slightly less inspiring slogan: a bridge to twenty years ago. As crazy as it sounds, it might be the best she can do.

Just in case there was any lingering doubt that Planned Parenthood doesn’t give a hoot about “women’s health”—or anyone’s health, for that matter—the abortion giant is now on record favoring the “right” of HIV-positive people not to disclose their status to sex partners.

From their pamphlet, the ironically titled “Happy, Healthy, and Hot”: “Your decision about whether to disclose may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.”

Surely the pamphlet only means friends and co-workers though, right? Actually, no. The pamphlet continues: “Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else. These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.” The pamphlet then encourages the reader to get involved to change such laws “that violate your rights.”

So basically Planned Parenthood is encouraging people to pull a Charlie Sheen; or at least condoning it. The renowned actor revealed in November that he had known for about four years that he is HIV positive, though he claimed that he always informed his sex partners of his status, with “no exceptions.” This came as something of a surprise to Bree Olson, Sheen’s former live-in girlfriend, who thankfully tested negative. She claims that they had sex almost daily for about a year using lambskin condoms, at his insistence, which are not effective protection against HIV.

“He doesn’t even value my life,” said Olson about Sheen’s revelation. No kidding, cupcake.

Her only purpose was to serve his pleasure. If she had to die so that he could get his rocks off, that was, in Sheen’s calculation, a price worth paying. The fact that Olson has been in almost three hundred pornographic films indicates that she may not care that much about her own health and safety though Olson left the business in 2010 and has advised other women not to get involved. Perhaps she was just naïve when she got started in porn and has since had an epiphany.

It’s hard to believe that such selfish people as Charlie Sheen really exist but they do and they’re actually a lot more common than you might imagine. The fact that Planned Parenthood, which masquerades as a reputable medical organization, endorses the “right” not to inform sex partners of HIV status tells us that the camel has already gotten its nose under the tent. Though the attitude may not yet be mainstream, that doesn’t mean it could never be.

The author and journalist Randy Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994, shed light on the homosexual community’s culture of denial in his 1987 book “And the Band Played On”. Among Shilts’s premises is that homosexual political leaders talked a great game when it came to combatting AIDS but their action was lacking. They refused to consider any countermeasure to the AIDS “epidemic” that might hamper their sex lives. The most they would do is promote the use of condoms. They refused to speak out against the hookup culture that pervaded and continues to pervade the male homosexual community or, heaven forbid, to tell male homosexuals to keep their butt cheeks together. They were even squeamish about identifying male homosexuals as the primary “at risk” group, preferring instead to shotgun blast their preventative message, as impoverished as it was, to the public as a whole. The message might have had more impact if it had been aimed somewhere but that would have meant identifying a demographic group and addressing the specific high-risk behaviors that made that community unique—something they were entirely unwilling to do.

One can almost understand the rationale behind this kind of reckless denialism. The disease was discovered in 1981, just a few short years after male homosexuals had established sexually “liberated” enclaves in places like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They had just escaped the moral condemnation of their conservative parents and they weren’t about to give up their newfound “freedom” for anything, even if the new objection to their sexual habits was medical rather than moral. Any finger-wagging prude caught preaching that jive was not welcome at their never-ending orgy.

In the mid-1980s, the author David Horowitz, who was then on a journey from the Marxist Left to conservative Right, sat down with Randy Shilts to discuss AIDS, the burgeoning menace then stalking San Francisco. What Shilts told him was shocking. As Horowitz wrote in his biography, “Radical Son”: “According to Shilts, it was the gay leaders themselves who suppressed the research findings, along with the fact—now generally accepted by medical officials—that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. This was difficult to believe, but when I checked Shilts’s story, it turned out to be true. The Stonewall Gay Democratic Club, one of the political powers in the community, had summarized the politically correct view prevailing among activists in a slogan: ‘Sex doesn’t cause AIDS—a virus does.’ The activists were afraid that identifying the disease with promiscuous sex and also with gay sex—95 percent of the cases in San Francisco were among homosexual males—would stigmatize the ‘gay life-style’ and create a political backlash.”

Yeah, and we wouldn’t want to stigmatize the “gay” lifestyle, would we? I don’t know what’s wrong with stigmatizing a filthy sexual practice rife with adverse health consequences, including AIDS of course, but also gonorrhea, anal cancer, and intestinal parasites. We stigmatize smoking, why wouldn’t we stigmatize anal sex? Put me down as pro-stigma.

Unfortunately, male homosexuals whine that their rights are being violated whenever anyone looks askance at butt sex, the activity that apparently defines them. They demand not only the right to engage in dangerous, unhealthy sexual behavior, but the right to positive affirmation as well.

Sadly, the medical community seems to be fulfilling their wish. Doctors these days live in fear that their careers will be summarily ended if they advise against anal sodomy—which is pretty good medical advice, no matter how you slice it. To cite just one example, consider Dr. Paul Church, a well-respected urologist who was recently fired from his position at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston for opposing the homosexual lifestyle on moral and medical grounds. His story began in 2009 when BIDMC sent out an email inviting staff members to ride on the hospital-sponsored float in an upcoming “pride” parade. Dr. Church responded with a mass email of his own, asking why a hospital would endorse a behavior with undeniable health consequences that include death. “If a medical scientist cannot raise research that the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control clearly shows homosexual conduct as harmful,” he concluded, “then that means that your health, my health, medical science — all of that is being called into question simply because of a political agenda.”

He was right, of course, though it’s dangerous to be right when your employer is wrong. The torrent of homosexual outrage came down on Dr. Church hard. After a lengthy fight with BIDMC, he lost his job. He may lose his positions at other Boston-area medical centers, including Harvard Medical School, where he also practices medicine.

Church was essentially fired for being a good doctor, for staying true to the Hippocratic Oath he took to “do no harm” at a time when all the other doctors around him had abandoned theirs. “Truly caring for the well-being of individuals requires telling them the truth about their choices,” said Church. “The hospital does this on less controversial issues such as smoking and diet.” Yes, that’s true, but smokers and fat people don’t have well-financed and well-organized political apparatuses and they don’t crush people who get in their way. That’s the difference.

The homofascists had to make an example out of somebody and they chose Dr. Church. The chilling effect will be felt far and wide—no one will dare point out that homosexuals are perverting medicine’s core mission, though they plainly are.

We’re living in an era of hedonism, in which a substantial portion of the population careens from disco to disco and from orgasm to orgasm. Not all such hedonists are homosexuals, of course—there is always the occasional Charlie Sheen—but a significant number of them are. There is nothing they won’t do just to keep the good times rolling. They don’t care about other people’s health or safety, nor do they care about facts or truth. They care only about their own pleasure and they will stop at nothing to secure it.

The Force Awakens opened this Friday to packed theaters across America. I haven’t seen it for a number of reasons, among which is an unwillingness to tent out for days just to buy tickets. The film will nonetheless make oodles of money, I’m sure, as Star Wars has replaced the Bible as Western civilization’s primary cultural commonality, both relevant and accessible to people across the societal spectrum.

This seventh chapter of the epic space opera may be the first to steer clear of political themes. According to film critic Matt Singer, “The Force Awakens is — arguably to its detriment — completely uninterested in politics.” This newfound political disinterest may have something to do with the fact that Star Wars is no longer the property of its creator, George Lucas, who infused the prequels and, to a lesser extent, the original trilogy, with political overtones.

Star Wars has never been what it appears to be—good clean fun with spaceships and laser beams. Don’t feel bad; that’s what I thought it was too when I was a little kid playing with action figures.

Space ships and laser beams are the packaging not the story. To get to the real story it’s necessary to turn the clock back to April 1973, a time of great disillusionment, when the last American combat troops were withdrawing from Vietnam and the Watergate hearings were only a month away. With these generation-shaping events as a backdrop, twenty-eight year old George Lucas began typing the story of a courageous farm boy from the galaxy’s rural backwaters who took on a rotting empire replete with militarism and darkness—and won.

He told his audience that it all took place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” but its actual setting was both contemporary and terrestrial. Star Wars was an allegory for the world as seen through the eyes of a baby boomer who had come of age on a college campus in the 1960s, who had felt the draft board breathing down his neck, and who had imbibed the spirit of San Francisco, where he was living at the time. The militaristic empire he imagined was his own country and the rebels were communist Vietnamese, though they could have been any number of “anti-imperialist” forces around the globe—the ANC in South Africa, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, etc. The Death Star was a warning against the destructive power of nuclear weapons, though it could be seen as analogous to the Pentagon. Darth Vader? Probably Dick Nixon or just a stand-in for the soulless admirals and generals in command of the war machine.

Lucas had other influences, of course, because inspiration is never that simple. Star Wars was also one part Flash Gordon serial and one part gun-slinging western with a whole heap of Kurosawa’s samurai cinema thrown in. The story also paralleled the Third Reich, starring Darth Vader as Hitler and stormtroopers as, well…stormtroopers.

But it was always about America, the only country George Lucas had ever known. If the film evoked images of Nazi Germany, the logical conclusion was that that’s what America had become or was on the verge of becoming. Star Wars could be read as a cautionary tale of what might happen if we didn’t change course.

Consider some of the notes Lucas scribbled in late 1973: “Aquilae is a small independent country like North Vietnam, threatened by a neighbour or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire. Fight to get rightful planet back. Half of the system has been lost to gangsters…The empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election…We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.”

That’s not exactly the Star Wars we all know and love, largely because Lucas’s concept still had a lot of growing to do, but the framework was there. From its earliest drafts, the script told the story of a scrappy underdog, patterned after North Vietnam, doing battle with a corrupt American empire. The underdog had only his convictions to give him heart, while the empire, which seemed invincible, was actually rotten to the core.

The politics got even more heavy in the prequels, culminating in the hyperpolitical Revenge of the Sith, which the Washington Post jokingly dubbed The Empire Strikes Bush. Actually, the Galactic Empire is Bush, but I understand it’s a fun witticism. Sith’s subliminal messages were not lost on The New York Times’s film reviewer A.O. Scott, who wrote: “’Revenge of the Sith’ is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader…echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, ‘If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.’”

That wasn’t really Darth Vader; or not yet. It was Anakin Skywalker, but clearly he was mimicking Bush’s post-9/11 admonition to foreign leaders, “Either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

So you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the newest film would abstain from political commentary. That’s really unfortunate because we need it now more than ever. We’re a nation adrift, led by a corrupt, unprincipled political class that seems to have pulled the wool over the eyes of half the population.

Consider for a moment the scene in Revenge of the Sith in which Emperor Palpatine convinces the Senate to cede unprecedented power to him, thus establishing the Galactic Empire “in order to secure the security” of the Republic. Queen Amidala famously remarks “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.” Lucas was surely knocking Bush though it’s even more relevant today. The scene seemed a clever reference to the PATRIOT Act which, in case you haven’t noticed, is still the law of the land because Barack Obama approved its extension. But the Senate scene was about a lot more than just the PATRIOT Act; it was about our willingness, in times of trouble, to cede the power vested in the people and their elected representatives to a single charismatic leader. In light of Obama’s imperial presidency, the scene has assumed new meaning.

Richard Nixon and George W. Bush weren’t great presidents but neither were they Emperor Palpatine. I can’t say the same about President Obama who really does bear a striking resemblance to that wrinkled geezer in a hoody. So why can’t we make a movie about his policies, about his administration?

The Obama Administration has given us so much material to work with, the script would practically write itself. Imagine an evil Sith Lord who sweeps away any restraints on his authority with the words, “If the Senate won’t act, I will” or “We can’t wait for (fill in the blank).” The same Sith Lord could go to war in a sandy place resembling Tatooine without the approval of the Senate. Here’s a better one—the aforementioned villain pits one alien race against another (Jawas vs. Ewoks?) with his constantly divisive rhetoric, then uses the crisis to snatch up all the blasters and lightsabers in the galaxy. Stormtroopers go planet to planet, kicking down doors and confiscating anything that resembles a weapon. One of the Sith Lord’s closest advisors then turns to his boss and mutters something like “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Another idea: A council of supposed sages, call them judges if you will, abandon their fidelity to the law they swore to uphold and begin making decisions based on their own personal agendas. Here’s a good one—the Jedi are prohibited from practicing their ancient religion for fear that some people might get their feelings hurt.

Why, oh why, did Star Wars stop being political at the very moment that the most Palpatine-esque president ever to defile the Oval Office came to power? Maybe it’s because George Lucas isn’t at the helm anymore, though it’s doubtful that his directing and/or production would have made a difference. I suspect that The Force Awakens would still avoid criticizing the president because Lucas has, or once had, a man-crush on him. Said Lucas in 2008: “We have a hero in the making back in the United States today because we have a new candidate for president of the United States, Barack Obama.” Whether Lucas still feels that way is unknown. Perhaps he’s been appalled with what he’s seen in the ensuing seven years but I doubt it.

It’s almost as if political commentary just isn’t cool in show biz anymore. Would a major movie studio even make a film that was so obviously critical of this president and his policies? I have my doubts. Dissent isn’t patriotic anymore, less so in Hollywood, so I guess we’ll have to settle for spaceships and laser beams. What a pity.

According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, Americans have once again contracted war fever. For the first time a majority (53 percent) of the public wants to send ground troops to battle ISIS. Coming on the heels of three horrific ISIS-linked terrorist attacks—the Russian jetliner, the November attacks in Paris, and the San Bernardino spree killing—this is not entirely surprising. People are understandably fed up with Islamic crazies killing innocent people.

I’m sick of it too, though less eager to send ground troops. Not that we have any good options.

Our policy thus far has been “no boots on the ground,” or at least that’s what the White House has told us. “No boots” isn’t entirely true—just like everything else this lying president says. There are indeed some boots on the ground in the Middle East stamped “made in the USA” on their soles but for the most part we’ve chosen to fight ISIS from the sky.

Our airpower strategy has not rolled back ISIS, for a number of reasons, the first of which is that it telegraphs to the enemy that we are irresolute in our mission. We can’t stomach casualties and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the grand poohbah of ISIS, know this. Why should he despair? Second, airpower alone doesn’t win wars. No piece of territory is truly secure until the infantry marches in and plants the flag. Our Air Force is, of course, supporting ground troops but they happen to be Iraqi and our Iraqi allies have proven themselves to lack “combat effectiveness”—which is a nice way of saying that they suck hind teet.

The time has long since passed to decide whether we should go big or go home. I don’t like either option and for that I am glad I’m not the commander-in-chief. I’d rather not make such a weighty decision. Unfortunately, the guy who is charged with such decisions—with congressional approval of course—seems indecisive. He has condemned us to another few years of farting around with neither a cohesive strategy nor a vision of victory.

If the latest poll is any indicator, the American people, by a bare majority, have embraced “going big” and rejected “going home.” At least that’s what their fickle opinion is this week. Next week might be different and if troops remain in Iraq and Syria for any extended period of time public opinion will inevitably turn south. Americans only like war when it’s quick and easy. When soldiers start coming home in body bags we’ll blame our leaders for giving us the war we asked for.

I believe that most of that 53 percent of Americans who want to send our young people back to the sandbox labor under the mistaken belief that our military is a well-oiled machine that will make mincemeat out of ISIS. I would warn these people that our military is actually pretty ragged—under-funded, undertrained, and sorely lacking in the morale department. Most importantly, it’s been wussified—forced by politicians and general officers to become the “kindler gentler military” Stephanie Gutmann warned of fifteen years ago in her seminal book by the same name. If you haven’t read it, you need to.

Slashed military budgets have shrunken our armed forces. The US Army is now the smallest it’s been since before World War II and the US Navy the smallest since before World War I. We’re still asking this skeleton crew to keep the sea lanes open and to hold down the fort in Korea, something we didn’t ask of them in our pre-superpower era.

Morale continues its descent into the abyss. In 2014, the Military Times commissioned a survey of 2,300 military members to gage their satisfaction with military life—with bleak results. Only 56 percent of troops agreed with the statement “Overall my quality of life is good,” compared to 91 percent who said the same thing in 2009. Seventy percent of troops agreed with the statement that “quality of life will decline in coming years.” Only 27 percent said that officers in senior leadership positions had the rank-and-file’s best interest at heart—a clear indicator that careerism is having a corrosive effect on the military. As journalist Hope Hodge Seck wrote in the Military Times: “Today’s service members say they feel underpaid, under-equipped and under-appreciated, the survey data show.”

“Underpaid” is something of an understatement. Annual pay raises, which were once almost guaranteed to be at least two percent, are now sometimes as low as one percent. The last time pay raises exceeded two percent was in 2010, when the troops’ salaries were bumped up 3.4 percent. Since then, the pay raises have been 1.4 percent (2011), 1.6 percent (2012), 1.7 percent, (2013) one percent (2014), and one percent (2015). The pay raise taking effect this New Year’s Day is a mere 1.3 percent.

Perhaps the most terrifying trend in today’s military is the diminution of the warrior spirit. This “wussification” of the US military has probably been underway for decades but it shifted into hyperdrive after the ascendency of Barack Obama. His campaign to get women into combat arms positions—even elite units—without lowering standards was exposed as a farce at the very same press conference at which it was unveiled. As General Martin Dempsey famously pronounced in January 2013, “Importantly, though, if we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?” But don’t worry, standards won’t be lowered—and you’re sexist if you say otherwise.

The wussification of the Army is nearing its end stage. Consider the US Army Drill Sergeant School in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where noncommissioned officers go to learn how to train raw recruits. It prides itself on its New Army ethos—which means that there’s a lot less butt-chewing and apparently, according to one drill sergeant quoted in an article by journalist Jeff Wilkinson, no more “smoking” the privates. For non-veterans, “smoking” is when the drill sergeant makes the privates engage in all sorts of physically demanding exercises—pushups for sure, but also alligator walking, walrus crawling, T-bones, flutter kicks, and leg lifts. “We don’t smoke people anymore,” said Drill Sergeant Danielle Brooks. “But sometimes you have to give them a little extra TLC.” I wish this were The Onion but it isn’t. The drill sergeant really thinks it’s her job to deliver tender loving care. She might as well wear a button that says “free hugs.”

This is not your father’s Army. It isn’t even the Army I joined in 1999. My drill sergeants relished “smoking” the privates. I recall one particularly hard drill sergeant who I’m quite certain would not graduate from today’s Drill Sergeant School on account of his old-fashioned approach to training. Whether the privates were getting enough TLC was not his top concern.

I’m sure that wussification proponents would argue that “smoking” the privates does little to improve their training. I disagree. “Smoking” the privates instills mental toughness and, at very least, gets them into shape. Many young people joining the military today are neither mentally tough nor physically fit so someone must furnish them with these commodities. I’ll use myself as an example—I lost forty pounds in basic training and gained a lot of self confidence. That would not have happened if Danielle Brooks had been my drill sergeant.

Before we go sending the bloom of our youth to fight crazy dudes on a mission from Allah, it might be prudent to ask ourselves if we have truly prepared them. Are we going to send a chubby teenager, who, through no fault of his own, never did so much as a pushup in basic training, off to battle ISIS? What if that teenager isn’t properly equipped and his morale is in the gutter because he can’t pay his bills? I say no. It wouldn’t be fair to that teenager to expect him to engage in real combat where he’s likely to have his feelings hurt with no one around to give him a hug.

We’ve neglected our armed forces for a long time and we can’t now expect that they will perform as they did in generations past. Let’s hit the brakes on the rush to send ground troops to the Middle East.

Township High School District 211 in suburban Chicago settled its ongoing dispute last week with the federal Department of Education (DoE) concerning a biologically male student who wants to use the girls’ changing room because he thinks he’s a she. Though the school district had already substantially indulged the boy’s delusions it was until recently insisting that the boy use a “privacy curtain” when disrobing, a compromise which the student and the federal government found unconscionable.

The recent agreement reached between the school district and the feds stipulates that “the school district will provide multiple changing areas with privacy curtains, for the student and any others who want privacy.” So now everyone gets a privacy curtain and it’s up to each student whether to use it.

It should come as no surprise that the student and the ACLU still aren’t happy with the resolution. Though the school district can now claim that it’s providing all the “girls”—both real and imagined—equal access to private changing areas, the transgender “girl’s” mere presence in the locker room has precipitated a policy change that falls short of full victory for transgender “rights.” Clearly, the school district is still treating him as a different kind of girl—which he is, of course. He’s a “girl” with a penis—a make-believe girl. “Girls” with penises tend to be treated differently than girls without them and that makes “girls” with penises feel marginalized. Boo hoo.

If only France had sensible gun control laws, the Paris attacks of November 13th would not have happened.

Okay, everyone knows that isn’t true. France has gone way beyond “sensible” gun control laws and has, for all practical purposes, banned civilian ownership of firearms. It didn’t stop last week’s surreal carnage—and it won’t stop the next attack either.

The ordinance prohibited discrimination based upon a number of protected categories, most of which were uncontroversial and already covered by state and federal laws. That was the window dressing. The real issue concerned banning discrimination based on the amorphous social construct known as “sexual orientation” and the even more problematic “gender identity.”

Particularly galling to HERO supporters was the opposition’s succinct slogan: “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms.” Once voters understood the issue in those terms the ordinance was doomed. HERO’s supporters count the slogan as one of the most egregious “lies” told in a vicious smear campaign. The only problem is that it happens to be true.

A little background on HERO would be appropriate here. The original HERO legislation debated in the Houston City Council in 2014 explicitly stated that any person would be allowed to use “public” restrooms consistent with his or her “gender identity.” In plain English that means that dudes would be allowed into ladies’ rooms—provided that those dudes believe in their heart of hearts that they were born with incorrect body parts…or simply claim to. Women changing into their sweats at a Curves gym might look up and see a guy standing there in all his naked glory; and as long as that guy proclaims himself to be a woman, the law would indulge his delusion.

But this version of the bill was not meant to be; so Mayor Parker, liar that she is, decided to drop the explicit bathroom language from the bill while assuring supporters that the change had zero impact on the law’s effects. According to the Houston Chronicle: “The proposed amendment would remove that paragraph [concerning bathrooms] of the expansive ordinance. Transgender people barred access to a restroom still would be able to file a discrimination complaint to the city’s Office of Inspector General under the process outlined for all protected characteristics, such as race and veteran status.” Mayor Parker later tweeted: “To my trans sisters/brothers: you’re still fully protected in Equal Rights Ordinance. We’re simply removing language that singled you out.”

How can her tweet be interpreted as anything other than an admission that her supposed compromise on the bathroom issue was in fact a smokescreen? She clearly understood that the people of Houston would never swallow this bitter pill without first being lulled into believing that it has nothing to do with creepy dudes in ladies’ rooms—which it does. Both sides know HERO is about bathrooms but only one side wants to talk about it. Stealth is the Left’s watchword.

Predictably, the Houston Chronicle also ran an article bemoaning the intransigent opposition. The subtitle of the article shouted: “Compromise suggested for city ordinance not enough for some GOP, faith leaders.” Oh, those stubborn conservatives, when will they ever learn the value of compromise?

Perhaps conservatives didn’t want to “compromise” with the homofascist mayor because she’d already admitted that the exclusion of bathroom language didn’t alter the law one iota. A compromise without concessions from both sides is no compromise at all. That’s just caving. And why should HERO opponents cave when they have the voters behind them?

It should come as no surprise that the Houston Chronicle endorsed HERO twice. Nor should it surprise anyone that the same Chronicle reporter, Jayme Fraser, wrote both articles—the one that essentially admitted that the new HERO was the same as the old HERO, and the one that portrayed conservative leaders as rigidly opposed to any compromise. Fraser can’t claim ignorance. She knew that Mayor Parker’s compromise was bogus and yet she still wrote a ludicrous article implying that the anti-HERO camp was stubbornly refusing to meet HERO supporters halfway.

Liberals are generally pretty bad at compromise and the homofascist subset is absolutely incapable of it. This is the Civil Rights Movement all over again and you’re Bull Connor. Ergo, they get everything and you get nothing. They don’t always get their way because sometimes they just lose; but they never settle for half a loaf and they absolutely never give up.

On occasion, they’ll offer a faux compromise of the variety that Parker proposed. Other times they try the incrementalist approach—“settling” for a partial victory, only to return shortly thereafter wanting to renegotiate the deal. After three or four partial victories they find that they’ve achieved everything they wanted. But most of the time the LGBTQXYZ activists don’t even do that. They concoct phony hate crimes, they riot, they sue, they get people fired from their jobs, and occasionally they even murder people. When they finally taste sweet victory they run the rainbow banner up the flagpole and declare #Lovewins!

If you want to know how averse the tolerance bullies are to compromise, consider the pickle that suburban Palatine, Illinois has found itself in trying to accommodate a delusional high school student who thinks he’s a girl. The boy has made a plethora of demands to which his high school has readily acceded including the use of feminine pronouns. The school has even allowed him to join girls’ sports teams and to use the girls’ locker room. The final stumbling block to a copasetic agreement is that the school wants him to disrobe behind a curtain for the sake of the other girls’—which to say the actual girls’—privacy.

Not. Good. Enough.

The gender dysphoric student sued the school with the support of the ACLU and the Obama Administration. According to an AP story: “The district could lose up to $6 million in federal funding if it can’t reach a deal with the [Department of Education Office of Civil Rights], which has said the privacy curtains are discriminatory unless all the girls are required to use them.” Actually, none of the girls are required to use them. The only one who has to use a curtain is the boy who refuses to change in the appropriate locker room.

Officials at the Department of Education appear to share the boy’s mental illness. “Unfortunately, Township High School District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room,” said a spokesperson.

Uh…not exactly. This isn’t a story about a female student not being allowed to use the girls’ locker room. It’s not even a story about a male student not being allowed to use the girls’ locker room. It’s a story about a male student with full access to the girls’ locker room but who still isn’t satisfied because he has to change behind a curtain.

I must admit though that I understand why he cannot accept even this tiny compromise. The curtain will always be a reminder that the school is humoring him. They’ll only go so far in treating him like one of the girls—because he isn’t. Intolerable! Everyone must be forced to believe the Big Lie. This is a “civil rights issue” and nothing less than total capitulation will suffice. We wouldn’t meet Jim Crow supporters halfway, would we?

We lost the last war with the homofascists because we tried to accommodate them. We thought we could offer them civil unions—all the benefits of marriage without the word. They weren’t satisfied. We thought we could let them do their thing and it would never affect us, but soon they were forcing us to be unwilling participants in their sham weddings, demanding to use church-owned property for their ceremonies, and dismantling long-standing codes of conduct for teachers at religious schools. There is no “live and let live” with these people. It’s absolute servility or pitched battle, nothing in between.

Kids in Maplewood, New Jersey were recently disappointed, then excited again, to learn that their school’s Halloween festivities had been cancelled and then reinstated.

Maplewood’s Seth Boyden Elementary School has traditionally hosted spooky activities on or around October 31 but has found that more and more parents are choosing to opt their children out on account of the holiday’s pagan origins. “We have a very diverse school district,” district spokeswoman Suzanne Turner said. “Every year, we have students who opt out of the [Halloween celebration] and the principal felt that number was significant enough,” to cancel this year’s festivities. At least twenty percent of children were not participating.

According to a syndicated article by reporter Jessica Mazzola, the party-poopers are evangelical Christians. Yes, I know it seems a little difficult to believe. Most American Christians, and indeed most American Evangelicals, celebrate Halloween. Many churches even sponsor Halloween parties and trunk-or-treat events. Am I supposed to believe that this small minority of Christians makes up a fifth of the school age population in a New York suburb? Apparently so.

The framing of the issue sounds eerily familiar, even if the group the school intended to placate — Evangelical Christians — is highly unusual. We can now add Halloween parties to the list of things we can’t do because we live in a diverse society.

Can’t do that, can’t say that, can’t wear that, can’t think that, can’t eat that, because  …  diversity.

Advocates of diversity ought to familiarize themselves with a little thing called “truth in advertising.” Like all ideas, diversity is “sold,” in a manner of speaking. Great efforts are made to get the public to buy into the concept that the optimal model for society is a heterogeneous jumble of people who share nothing in common. The fewer commonalities we have, the better! That’s what diversity means — differentness. It’s enough to make you wonder what the benefits of diversity are; besides the race riots and lack of social cohesion, I mean. As many condescending liberals have explained to me, the benefits of living in a diverse society include a panoply of ethnic restaurants right in our own neighborhoods … and not much else. I guess that’s a good enough selling point for some people.

But is it too much to ask of diversity’s booster club that they at least disclose the price of diversity before we decide it’s something we want? They never do. Diversity is promoted as an unqualified good, something that only a crazy person wouldn’t like. It’s all roses, no thorns.

Until the bill comes due, that is, and then we find out that diversity isn’t free. With a myriad of cultures comes a limitless set of traditions, social norms, prickly sensibilities and hot button issues. Someone is always bound to take offense or to feel excluded, which requires us to reinvent our culture from the bottom up. Now that we live in a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual, and even multi-gendered (!) society, our old ways are no longer appropriate.

I could easily write a book filled with examples of stuff that the diversity enforcers won’t allow us to say, do, and think. I would call it “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a phrase you probably heard your father say when you broke a lamp playing ball in the house. For the sake of brevity, I have compiled a short list of “nice things” that people living in diverse environments can’t have.

Catholic Organizations — at Catholic Universities

Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington decided in 2013 that its nondiscrimination policy would not permit it to recognize a campus chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s organization. This would be bad enough if it weren’t for the fact that Gonzaga is, in theory at least, a Catholic university.

Sue Weitz, Gonzaga’s vice president for student life, explained that the decision hinged on the fact that the K of C requires all of its members to be Catholic. “If Gonzaga was an institution that served only Catholics and limited the benefits of the collegiate experience only to them, the decision-making process may have been different,” she wrote.

So if everyone were Catholic, this wouldn’t be an issue. She ignores the fact that all of its students chose Gonzaga knowing that it is Catholic and some probably because it is Catholic. Even so, her message is clear: the K of C would be okay if all students were of one religion, but because they aren’t, it will find no shelter at her university. “To embrace diversity and yet endorse a group based on faith exclusivity is a challenge that cannot be reconciled at this time,” she continued. In other words, Gonzaga can either have diversity or the Knights but not both.

Thankfully, the decision was later reversed and the world did not end.

Respect for the Military

Yes, some people are offended by the sight of uniformed service members; and by “some people,” I mean Muslims. Sergeant Mark Prendeville, a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force, learned this lesson when he was brought to the hospital emergency room in Margate, England, after being sprayed in the eyes with a chemical fire extinguisher, and was twice moved so that other patients wouldn’t be offended by the sight a British airman. According to hospital staff, there had been a previous altercation in the hospital between someone of an unspecified culture and a member of Her Majesty’s armed forces. When Prendeville asked why he was being moved, he was told that “We have all kinds of different cultures coming in and you might upset them.” We’re left to guess which “different cultures” she meant but I’ll wager it wasn’t Latvians.

Instead of doing the brave thing, the hospital staff decided to pursue a policy of hiding the squaddie in the back room like some kind of shameful family secret. Disgusting.

Innocuous High School Plays

In 1999, Amherst High School in Amherst, Massachusetts decided that it would not allow a student production of “West Side Story.” Because diversity.

Apparently “West Side Story” promotes racial stereotypes and is therefore offensive to the Puerto Rican community. It’s practically the theatrical version of an old South lynching! As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Principal Scott Goldman stressed that ‘West Side Story’ … was not banned but canceled. ‘This isn’t about censorship,’ he insisted. ‘It’s about sensitivity.’”

Riiiiight. Because “canceled” sounds so much nicer than “banned” just as “sensitivity” sounds nicer than “censorship.”

Amherst High student Bruce Penniman, who supported the ban — oops, I mean cancellation — explained why the musical had to go. “Amherst has become a very diverse place. Latinos, African- Americans, and Asians make up 30 percent of the student body.” Oh, that really clears things up. So West Side Story wouldn’t have been problematic in the Amherst of an earlier era but as the population grew more diverse racial hypersensitivity became an imperative.

Cystic Fibrosis Fundraisers

The student association of Carleton University in Ottawa voted nearly unanimously in 2008 to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the benefactor of funds raised during its annual charity drive because the disease was apparently not “inclusive” enough. According to the resolution, cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.” Ergo, the charity would not receive a dime. Diversity was predictably cited as justification. According to the resolution: “[A]ll orientees and volunteers should feel like their fundraising efforts will serve the their [sic] diverse communities.”

A few of the charity’s defenders pointed out that, contrary to the resolution’s medical quackery, cystic fibrosis is not some kind of white man’s disease. It impacts white men disproportionately but not exclusively. Even this argument was a capitulation to their twisted logic. What they should have said is “So what?” Cystic fibrosis is a chronic illness that causes a lifetime of pain. The charity was a worthy cause regardless of its victims.

I could go on and on with dozens of more examples. Far from being a bonus, diversity looms as a pagan god that demands the constant sacrifice of everything we hold dear. In exchange for a few benefits — exotic restaurants, I guess? — it compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency. The terms of the Faustian bargain are never spoken aloud of course because no one would ever accept it if they were. Diversity’s salesmen will tell us that there is much to gain and nothing to lose though experience should tell us that they’re lying. It first demands that we give up the small stuff, things that seem insignificant when considered in isolation, such as silly high school musicals. What’s the big deal if we ditch West Side Story for the sake of racial harmony? But it doesn’t stop there because diversity’s hunger is never sated. A precedent has been set and will inevitably be followed from there on out.

Diversity, in a nutshell, is the reason we can’t have nice things.

The mainstream media is loath to admit it but Hillary Clinton had a very bad day testifying before the Benghazi committee. When Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) confronted the former Secretary of State with her own emails concerning the 2012 terrorist attack, Mrs. Clinton flailed gracelessly and backpedaled from previous statements.

The emails concern the motive for the attack and its perpetrators. It was never about “The Innocence of Muslims,” a Youtube video that portrayed the historical Mohammad as a truly villainous character. Nearly everyone now admits that the video did not spark the great Benghazi conflagration that left four Americans dead and a consulate in ruins—and by “everyone,” I mean members of the Obama Administration. It was like pulling teeth to get them to concede the point but they apparently have. Their current position is that they made an honest mistake in the Clausewitzian “fog of war.” As difficult as it was to defend the “honest mistake” narrative before Clinton’s emails were uncovered, it is now impossible—or at least it’s impossible for people who care about facts.

Three emails discovered on Mrs. Clinton’s illegal private email server—the one she wiped to stymie investigators—reveal that the secretary never believed the Youtube yarn for a moment. The night of the attack she confided in her daughter Chelsea via email that the compound had been besieged by an “al-Qaeda like group.” She said something similar to the president of Libya, and to Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil she wrote: “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to with the film. It was a planned attack not a protest.” These words were written approximately twenty-four hours after the attack.

Being the skilled liar that she is, Clinton actually tried to deny that she had ever claimed otherwise. Clearly it was a terrorist attack, not a spontaneous protest gone awry, and she had said so all along!

Okay, not really. On the night of the attack, she addressed the nation, saying:

“Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”

So there are two lies in that brief statement—that our government values religious tolerance (LOL!) and that the attack was spurred by a video. I’m sure her defenders, weasels that they are, will argue that Clinton never definitively blamed the video but only claimed that “some” sought to justify the attack on those grounds. Who those “some” are is unclear, especially when one considers that the rumor was spawned at the highest levels of the US government. In any case, it’s weak sauce. She was clearly blaming “The Innocence of Muslims,” just as the rest of the administration did. They had their talking points coordinated and they spoke with one voice—blame the video!

This new revelation should go a long way toward debunking the results of the sham investigation concluded last November which found the administration blameless. How anyone could have come to that conclusion without examining all the evidence is beyond me. They obviously never subpoenaed the secretary’s emails or they would have discovered, months before anyone else did, that Hillary was using a private, unsecured email server. They didn’t find any fault because they didn’t look very hard.

It would be prudent at this point for Mrs. Clinton and her former boss to apologize to the American public for misleading them. It’ll never happen, I know. But there’s another person, a non-American, who also deserves an apology. His name is Nakoula Bassely Nakoula and he produced the video under the pseudonym “Sam Bacile.” Mr. Nakoula was the administration’s sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter so that the administration could appease the mob, escape blame, and win reelection. Besides the four dead Americans and their families, of course, no one has suffered more than he.

When Mrs. Clinton attended the funeral of Tyrone Woods, a security contractor and former Navy SEAL who gave his life trying to hold back the angry hordes, she approached Charles Woods, the victim’s father, and told him that she would seek retribution—not against the barbarians who killed his son, of course, but against Nakoula Bassely Nakoula. According to Mr. Woods, Clinton said “We’re going to make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” Yikes!

Nakoula was of course arrested and imprisoned just as Clinton promised he would be. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the picture of a man being hauled off by Los Angeles County sheriffs, his identity obscured behind a hat, a heavy buttoned-up coat, and what appears to be gauze across his face. It was another one of the many “They can’t do that in America!” moments that I’ve witnessed in recent years. Our government doesn’t jail people for making movies; or at least it’s not supposed to. That’s the kind of stuff you think happens only in places like China and Venezuela. It can’t happen here.

Oh, but it can and did. Granted, the man wasn’t charged with making an inflammatory film. He was charged with violating the terms of his probation, which forbad him, among other things, from using aliases. He also lied to the police about his involvement in the film. Both of his minor crimes can be understood as the actions of a man in fear for his life and those of his family.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that the charge was really the charge. It’s no coincidence that he was arrested just four days after the Benghazi attack though his video had been on Youtube for three months. His arrest and prosecution fulfilled Hillary Clinton’s promise to Charles Woods and appeased the Muslim world—at the expense of the first amendment, of course. Authorities had to find something to charge Nakoula with and minor probation violations were a good fit. Nakoula was sentenced to a year in prison.

What a disgraceful episode in American history. While no one in the government was obliged to defend the content of the video, someone should have stood up for our sacred freedoms. The current administration instead caved to the mob’s cries for vengeance. Barack Obama even appealed directly to Youtube, asking it to review the video to determine if it violated its terms of service, a clear suggestion that it should be removed. That’s too close to government censorship for my liking. To its credit, Youtube did not comply.

I was reminded of Nakoula again when I recently learned of Clinton’s 2010 meeting with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, where she promised to curb “Islamophobia” through the employment of “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” The OIC advocates for laws that would criminalize criticism of Islam as illegal “defamation.” Clinton was essentially meeting them halfway, trying to demonstrate that the “defamation” they feared could be rooted out by softer forms of censorship.

If this doesn’t frighten you, it should. Government officials should never talk this way. While peer pressure and shaming may sound like constitutional methods for making people shut their pie holes, they can quickly devolve into first amendment violations when practiced by the government. The dustup over “The Innocence of Muslims” offers an excellent case in point. No, the government won’t jail a man for making a video—it will find a pretext and jail him for that instead. No, the government won’t order Youtube to censor the film—it will ask Youtube to review its terms of service in hopes of persuading someone else to censor it instead.

See? It’s all perfectly legal!

Nakoula Bassely Nakoula paid a price that no one in a free society should ever have to pay for making a film. The administration should have had some testicular fortitude and told the Muslim world where to stick it. But it did the cowardly thing instead, as you knew it would, and fed the ravenous alligators in hopes of being eaten last. The Benghazi attack’s death toll ought to include the names of four dead Americans, of course, but also the first amendment, which died a little that day in September 2012.