Stealth Islamism

 We received our first bitter taste of Islamism in 2000, with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and, failing to respond forcefully to that attack, we received a devastating blow from radical Islam on 9/11/2001.

Since then, America has largely been successful in preventing an attack of the magnitude of 9/11, but Islamism isn’t done with us yet.  We may have prevented (so far) most of its violent manifestations here in America, but Its norms and practices are seeping in through the cracks and crevices of our society like a fog.  It has disguised itself and has begun to slip in surreptitiously.  And it has powerful allies inside our country.

Having just read new book The War on the West, it is abundantly clear that the West is under attack on several fronts—from China, Russia, and from Islamism.   China and Islamism, in particular, have been enormously successful in forging networks and alliances inside the U.S., particularly within the academic and political classes.

Islamism has gotten a foothold in Congress, following on the Islamist sympathies of the Obama Administration. The Squad got itself elected (with a little help from the Obama administration steering Somalis into a single district).  The anti-Semitism of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib wears the thinnest of veils and when Omar made blatant Jew hating remarks, the best the House could do was to pass a watered down resolution condemning hatred of all kinds.

It will be recalled that Obama pushed (and Biden is still attempting to restart) the JCPOA, which Trump killed and is being resurrected by the Biden administration.  The JCPOA will provide Iran with a direct path to the bomb.   After Trump facilitated the Abraham Accords, which historically allied some of the Arab nations with Israel to blunt the Islamist threat from Iran in the region.  By resurrecting JCPOA, and loosening sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration is kicking over the game board and empowering the most dangerous Islamist state in the region.  And remember, it was Obama who, after every terrorist incident across the globe, rushed to the podium to urge people not to “rush to judgment.”  And Obama was the only Western leader not to bother to make the trip to Europe in solidarity with other Western leaders after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Of course, there the matter of  leaving the Taliban with $80 billion of advanced US military hardware by cutting and running from Afghanistan last summer, providing weapons of war to the most backwards, most fundamentalist Islamist regime in the world.  It was quite a gift. 

But wait, there’s much more, and it’s stealthy and carries the odor of Islamism in our midst.

We have witnessed pathological movements over the past few years that raise significant issues.  Taken together, they raise the uncomfortable specter of Islamism’s tenets being adopted right here as cultural norms.

The face coverings were the first worrisome practice.   At first, they may have made sense because we didn’t know much about COVID.  But as time went on, we learned a couple of things.   Studies concluded that they were of little benefit.   Yet, politicians demanded that they continue to be used and teachers’ unions were the fiercest defenders of them, even though they imposed great impediments to learning, especially among younger children and children with special needs that need facial expressions and visualization of mouth movements to articulate words.  Face coverings are dehumanizing.   They deprive us of a significant facet of communication and prevent us from recognizing friends and allies.  They are STILL being required in NY schools and as cases rise, are being held over kids as a sword of Damocles in blue cities.

Second has been the development of the transgender movement.   Through the transgender movement, special protections for women have been removed.   Men that “identify” as women can compete in women’s sports, and in California, are allowed to be placed in women’s prisons.  The height of this absurdity has been the assertion that men can menstruate and have children.   What started as a movement for tolerance, the movement denigrates and erases women, leaves them vulnerable to abuse and most diabolically, attempts to contradict the thing that makes women so vital—only women can create and carry human life.

Third has been the sexualization of children.  I began to notice this with opinion pieces in the New York Times that suggested decriminalization of pedophilia and treating it like a sickness.  Then, we began to see the language play, with radical Leftists trying to water down the term pedophile to Minor Attracted Persons.  A couple of years ago, Drag Queen Story Hour became a feature in libraries across the country. The ball rolled downhill very quickly as Abigail Shrier raised the alarm about the transgender movement pushing at preadolescent girls with her book Irreversible Damage.  In some quarters, children are administered puberty blockers and are having gender reassignment surgery before adulthood.  And now we are in a full blown culture war with some school districts and Woke corporations like Disney, Mattel and State Farm behind exposing young children to matters of sexuality at a very young age.  The California legislature is not considering stripping away an important protective guard rail and impediment to pedophilia by allowing a defendant to assert that he or she “reasonably believed the child to be of the age of consent” which effectively means that, if enacted, it will be very difficult to convict these predators.  The Biden open border policy is a tacit acceptance of the child sex trafficking that is going on as a result right under our noses.

It will be recalled that the Obama administration’s official policy was to instruct soldiers to “look the other way” when Afghan soldiers and police sexually abused children and the State Department had a quandary when Afghan refugees brought their child brides with them to the states.  ISIS was infamous for having underage girls as sex slaves.  

So let’s add all this up and take stock.  We have a requirement for face coverings (even in the absence of a rational reason for them).  Check.  Degradation of women.  Check. Sexualization of children.  Check.  Genital mutilation. Check.

Gee, all of this is starting to look pretty Taliban-y to me.  The most abhorrent and revolting aspects of radical Islam are beginning to show up in our society under the guise of something else.  We are normalizing and accepting face coverings, the degradation of women, genital mutilation and the sexualization of children.  They may call them something different or assert a different purpose. Gender affirming surgery rather than genital mutilation.  Trans rights rather than degradation of women.  Face coverings to “slow the spread.”  But these are Islamist societal norms and practices and must be rejected in all their forms.   We must not let these practices take root here.

We've Sprung Leaks

 The chaotic state of affairs we find ourselves in at the moment would not be that difficult to solve, but it will take a yeoman’s effort to tighten things up.

Lots of commentators are ruminating about how America has lost its way and what, if anything, can be done to fix it.   Fixing the leaks would go a long way towards a solution.   A little duct tape and spackle in our institutions would work wonder.   It comes down to accountability—financially and otherwise.

Ukraine aid. 

 Rand Paul voted no on the aid package to Ukraine, and held it up for awhile even though he came under fire for doing so.  He didn’t oppose the aid.  What he opposed was $40 billion of our money being sent over with no oversight.   All he wanted was an inspector general to account for the spending.   It’s almost as if we learned nothing from the wasted billions in Afghanistan.   Unaccounted for funds tend to end up in peoples’ pockets.   Rand’s request was reasonable and sensible.  His colleagues mostly were having none of it.  This money will vanish down a rabbit hole.

BLM

And speaking of unaccounted for funds flowing into someone else’s pockets, there is Patrice Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter.  With millions flowing in to its coffers from individual and corporate donations, you would think that a number of HBCU’s would have endowed professorships, new building and scholarship funds.  New health care centers would be popping up in Chicago, New York and Atlanta.   Early childhood development centers would be springing up in inner city Philadelphia.

Well, actually, none of that happened.  We heard of no signature projects that actually helped black people.  What we did hear of are the mansions Ms.  Cullors purchased, the lavish parties she threw, the thousands she took out and thousands more that found their way into the pockets of Cullors’s squeeze and her brother.

Shame also on the corporations that wasted these donations on BLM, bypassing the usual vetting and accountability that goes with corporate giving.  Usually, charities have to make a case for the gift solicitation, and develop a proposal that shows exactly what the money will be used for and often keep the donor advised as to progress.  In the post- George Floyd frenzy, however, corporations simply wired money to BLM (a form of protection money?) with no accountability whatsoever.  Shame on them.

Gov’t money

The COVID “stimulus” money was shoveled out faster than they could print it (so now we have 8.5% inflation).  And state and local governments marinated in the largesse.   Illinois and Chicago were pretty typical.  COVID funds were diverted to favored political allies.  No budget reforms were enacted.  Illinois was able to get a credit rating upgrade without enacting a single budget reform. 

Most egregiously, both Mayor Lightfoot and Governor Pritzker sent millions to NGO’s for crime prevention and “violence interrupters”  without any accounting of exactly where these funds were going or any measure of the efficacy of the programs.  We have a pretty good idea of how well this is going with 4 mass shootings in the past week or so.  We also learned that some of these “violence interrupters” on the payroll of these community groups are themselves gang members.

Supreme Court leak.

Of course, the biggest leak lately was the draft of Justice Alito’s opinion purportedly overturning Roe.  Justice Clarence Thomas has asserted that it will change the nature of the Court, as judges will no longer be able to trust their clerks, or the process.  Several weeks on, we still don’t know who the leaker was, even though the number of possible suspects is quite  limited.   We also need to know who this person had connections with and whether he or she acted alone.

Like the Nashville bombing and the Las Vegas shooter, I suspect we may never get to the bottom of this.

The Vote

Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules documents the “ballot stuffing” that went on during the 2020 election with a strong inference that the deficiencies in the system (along with data analysis and video evidence of ballot box stuffing) were enough to tip the election in Biden’s favor.  While actual fraud is difficult to prove, enough questions were raised to question the outcome.  As with the Supreme Court leak, we not only need to have faith in the outcome, but we need to have faith in the process.

Grifting and corruption can be stopped.  Our institutions can be cleaned up.  But we need accountability, transparence and a restored faith in the process.   We need to stop the leaks.

What Republicans Got Wrong

 The original intent of this blog was to produce conservative and libertarian thought pieces with a bit of an original twist.  As I saw Reagan conservative losing steam with the passing of Reagan and William F. Buckley, it was my intent to write pieces that refreshed conservatism and libertarianism, and to do so in an interesting way.

To do that necessarily means that I would have to bring things current, to match the era.  The problems facing Reagan’s America are different than the problems we face today.  Second, I would have to critically analyze some of the things that conservatives and libertarians got wrong.   Both parts are necessary so that one does not simply become a tired, old, ossified ideological crank, yearning for some long past golden era.  How boring.

Today, I’m going to lay out the principal things that I believe conservative Republicans got wrong, and we’ve all paid a terrible price as a result.

Assuming trade would moderate China.
John Mersheimer is a controversial speaker and writer, but in his Foreign Affairs Essay, he wrote:

Beguiled by misguided theories about liberalism’s inevitable triumph and the obsolescence of great-power conflict, both Democratic and Republican administrations pursued a policy of engagement, which sought to help China grow richer.  Washington promoted investment in China and welcomed the country into the global trading system, thinking it would become a peace-loving democracy and a responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led international order.  Of course, this fantasy never materialized.

It was a horrible mistake, and one some of our brightest minds sold to us (hence, my skepticism about the judgment of “experts”).    As recently as four years ago, Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama was touting this line, that a middle class would bubble up in China, demand more freedoms and the CCP would have no choice but to grant them.  The Becker-Friedman Center at The University of Chicago is STILL having its China Biweekly Seminar on Public Economics, and Chicago Booth STILL has a Hong Kong campus, despite the brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, the internment of the Uhgyers, threating Taiwan, and the obfuscation of the origins of COVID.   What more evidence do you need to convince you that all of their basic premises about China were dead wrong?  They all acted as if Tiananmen Square never happened.  As long as cheap goods flowed into the Western companies, and Chinese students paying full sticker price at universities, they all refused to see what was happening—China was becoming a major geo-political rival, and instead of China becoming more like us, our society was becoming more like theirs.

Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.
Among other blunders of the George W. Bush administration was this pithy slogan.  While the U.S. was justified in a response to 9/11, our goals never critically evaluated and the net outcome was trillions added to our national balance sheet, expanded influence of Iran in the Middle East, thousands of needless deaths in Iraq, an expensive 20 year fiasco in Afghanistan that culminated in turning the keys back over to the Taliban and arming them with $80  billion in advanced U.S. weaponry.

Not only did these misadventures divert resources from a military that badly needs to be upgraded (our navy needs 50 more ships and our nuclear forces need serious modernizing), we gave our adversaries a free look at our command structure, our tactics and our technology. 

Foreign intervention by platitude was among the worst blunders by the conservative establishment.  Interestingly, the maverick Republicans—Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were very judicious and surgical in the application of military force.

My contrarian view is that the spectacular success of the 1991 Gulf War harmed the U.S.   Wiping out the world’s 3^rd largest army in 100 days created an air of hubris and invincibility that led to some very bad decisions later on.

CEO pay
As CEO pay reached the stratosphere, proponents of the free market like Steven Kaplan at The University of Chicago cheered it on, claiming that these executives are a rare breed and are like free agent athletes and should be able to garner these incredible pay packages.   CEO pay is now  299 times more than the average worker.

Advocates like Kaplan failed to take into account the corrosive effects on society these packages would have on our society.   CEO pay has ballooned $1,332% since 1978.  These executives live in rarified, gated communities completely segregated from the workers that they supposedly “lead” leading to what Charles Murray called “unseemliness.”  I don’t mind people getting wealthy when they actually create value and take on rise, but most of these arrangements limit their downside risk.  The CEO of Boeing walked away with $60 million even after the 737 Max killed two planeloads of people.   Few companies have instituted or exercised clawbacks after spectacular failures.

While it is consistent with free market principles, the  pay extravagance has become, according to Charles Murry, “unseemly” and corrosive to social cohesiveness.  The book “Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town” documented how private equity firms pillaged Anchor Hocking, and left the company and the town an empty shell.  That book, more than anything began to nudge me to evolve my views.

Focus on tax cuts and judicial appointments

Republicans put their sole focus on tax cuts and judicial appointments.  While those priorities were important, they completely neglected two others—the Administrative State and local politics, particularly school boards.   The radical Left seized upon that, and as a result, we have and IRS, FBI and DHS that have become enforcement arms of the DNC.  We have a CDC that is not only obscuring and misrepresenting data, it is making proclamations that de facto have the force of law.  And we have local school boards pushing the transgender agenda and CRT.  It will take a generation to reverse all this.

There are more stumbles, of course.  Republicans misunderstood how determined the radical Left was to manipulate and violate the rules to gain and keep power.   They falsely believed that the radical Left wanted to maintain a viable, democratic, two-party system.  They want nothing of the sort.  I have yet to see definitive signs (other than a few like DiSantis) that they have awoken from their slumber.