No Oil = No Islam? Hello, FLAMMABLE ICE!

From here:

Delingpole: Hello Flammable Ice; Bye Bye Renewables – Enter the Greenies’ Worst Nightmare

Albatross via Getty

by JAMES DELINGPOLE25 May 20171,899

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China is on the verge of unleashing an energy revolution which will destroy pretty much forever the green argument that “we are running out of fossil fuel.”

At the heart of this revolution is a miracle substance, sometimes known as “flammable ice”, made up of deposits of frozen gas concentrate in the ocean bed. The substance – methane hydrate – is incredibly energy intensive: according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration one cubic foot of flammable ice holds 164 cubic feet of regular natural gas.

It is by far the world’s most abundant reservoir of fossil fuel, as the Global Warming Policy Forum has reported.

According to one conservative academic calculation, Earth’s conventional reserves of natural gas hold 96 billion tonnes of carbon. Earth’s reserves of oil contain 160 billion tonnes. Earth’s reserves of coal contain 675 billion tonnes: Taken together, 931 billion tonnes of fossil fuel. But Earth’s methane hydrates contain 3,000 billion tons of carbon.

 Or more. Methane hydrates are found at larger and larger volumes the deeper you drill. ConocoPhillips drilled 830 metres for its field test at Prudhoe Bay. At this level, you calculate the reservoir of methane gas in the hundreds (100s) of trillions of cubic feet (tcf). Drill deeper and you calculate reserves in the thousands (1,000s) of trillion cubic feet. Drill deeper still and you calculate reserves in the hundred-thousands (100,000s) of trillion cubic feet. Earth’s reserves of this resource could theoretically reach millions (1,000,000s) of trillion cubic feet.

Though methane hydrate is not a newly discovered phenomenon – various countries are researching its potential including the U.S. and Japan – China’s announcement via its state media agency that it has made a “major breakthrough” in successfully collecting the frozen fuel means that it is one step closer to being used commercially.

This won’t be good news, long term, for the U.S. shale gas industry.

But it represents a far bigger disaster for the renewable energy industry. Green propagandists and crony capitalists have for years successfully gulled governments into believing that only renewables like solar and wind provide the answer to the world’s long term energy needs. The clue is in the name: it implies that, unlike other fuels, this is a form of energy which is never going to run out.

What it overlooks, of course, is both the massive environmental damage done by renewables – wind especially – and also their massive costs. There would be no wind, and probably no solar either, if it weren’t for the fact that they are so heavily subsidized as a result of the compulsory levies imposed on consumers by governments which have been drinking the green Kool-Aid.

One argument which green campaigners often used to advance for renewables was the Peak Oil myth. This lasted just so long as it took U.S. oil and gas men to invent horizontal fracking – at which point trillions of cubic feet of gas and billions of barrels of oil were magicked out of nowhere, providing enough fossil fuel to last generations, and to turn the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum products.

These methane hydrate deposits render the “Peak Energy” myth even more risibly ludicrous. Luckily for the West though they are abundant in Chinese waters – hence China’s aggressive recent manoeuvrings in the South China Sea – there are large deposits everywhere from the Arctic to America’s Eastern and Western seaboards to Northern Australia and the Indian Ocean.

This has enabled green campaigners to revive yet another of their favorite scare stories: that because methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide this will cause a potentially terrifying increase in “global warming.”

Very sadly for the greenies, this scare too is starting to look somewhat overdone. Indeed, if the results of the latest study by a team of U.S, Norwegian and German scientists are correct, then it is the 100 percent opposite of true.

The ocean waters near the surface of the Arctic Ocean absorbed 2,000 times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than the amount of methane that escaped into the atmosphere from the same waters, according to a study by the USGS Gas Hydrates Project and collaborators in Germany and Norway. The study was conducted near Norway’s Svalbard Islands, above several seafloor methane seeps.

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere where the study was conducted more than offset the potential warming effect of the methane emissions that were observed.

“If what we observed near Svalbard occurs more broadly at similar locations around the world, it could mean that methane seeps have a net cooling effect on climate, not a warming effect as we previously thought,” said USGS biogeochemist John Pohlman, who is the paper’s lead author. “We are looking forward to testing the hypothesis that shallow-water methane seeps are net greenhouse gas sinks in other locations.”

Yep. You read that right. Methane – deadly, evil methane, the stuff that we have long been taught by “experts” to fear even more than CO2 because it’s far more powerful a greenhouse gas and because once it starts seeping out of the melting tundra because climate change then warming will accelerate and we’ll all be doomed – may, it seems, cause global cooling not global warming.

BAN ISLAM!

The Qur'an and islam itself should be banned, and all muslims resisted and exiled, because everything muslims pretend to believe is "holy" is already a crime!

The Qur'an is more than just another flawed book of confusing, contradictory superstitious nonsense, it's evil.

To leftopaths, when islamic terrorists attack Infidels and then the infidel says please stop, that is the cause of the attack.

It should never be allowed by backwards people to be considered “illegal” to accuse these criminals (muslims) of their crimes, allegedly because the painful truth might offend them or hurt their feelings, and so “make” them commit even more crimes!

No problem was ever solved by ignoring it, and we aren't doing even any of these muslims (whose own ancestors were among Muhammad's first victims) any favours by going along with any of their historic lies and alibi excuses for their crimes.

Pretending islam is just another religion like all the others, hijacked by some con-men, is wrong.

That's only a parochial, Western-based and ethnocentrist approach to islam.

Islam is NOT only not a real religion which could be and is sometimes only occasionally misunderstood and/or taken advantage of by a few evil persons.

It's not also - as are all the other, "real" religions - only an opinion presented as a fact (i.e: only a simple case of delusive criminal fraud)!

Islam is really an actual threat to everyone because IT says it is, not because we misinterpreted it.

According to their own Eastern histories, islam has an official 1,400 year history of "holy" lies, extortions, robberies, tortures, arsons, kindappings, slaveries, rapes and 270 million murders: that's OVER A QUARTER-BILLION INNOCENTS SACRIFICED TO ALLAH, so far!

For a detailed breakdown of historical islamic depredations by region and era, just Google for: "Tears of Jihad."

Islam has a larger death-tally than that of EVERYONE ELSE, both secular and religious, COMBINED, and with an historical average of less than 1% of the global population to have committed it with, too!

Do the math: 270 million divided by 1,400 is almost 200,000 per year, or over 500 per day, or over 20 per hour or about one person every three minutes being murdered by Muslims ever since Islam was founded.

So, simply and precisely because of their "THOU SHALT KILL!" cultural indoctrination, MUSLIMS ARE STILL FROM BETWEEN FOUR AND SEVERAL HUNDRED TIMES MORE LIKELY TO ENGAGE IN MURDER (and all other crimes,) THAN EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD!

According to Paris-based Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar, "of France's 64,000 prisoners, up to 60% are Muslim. (Muslims are thought to compose only 8% of the population.)"

Based on data from 2011, Pew Research Center estimated that Muslims made up 9% of the 1,598,780 state and federal prisoners in the United States. Pew also reported that as of 2010, about 0.8% of the U.S. population was Muslim, up from 0.6% in 1990. Data allegedly provided by the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that, as of 1997, Muslims made up 7.27% of the federal prison population.

In other words, Muslims are overrepresented in the French prison population by 7.5 times their percentage of the population. In the United States, although their overall percentage is smaller, Muslims are overrepresented in the prison population by 11.25 times their percentage of the population.

Here's the most recent American prison-inmate-by-religion stats:

US Inmate population religious preferences

58% Christian
29% Muslim
13% Other (including Atheist)

Since muslims are at most 3% of the total population in America, it's obvious they are TEN TIMES more likely than their numbers would indicate, to be in prison.

And I believe Americans in general poll at 80% Christian, so they are under-represented in prison, by at least 30% or one third less than one might have otherwise expected, based on population percentage alone.

But it's not surprising, really:

ALL muslims are criminals: by their own rules, they must endorse in public every word in the Qur’an, which tells them that they are so “superior” to all non-muslims, that it’s not only their right, but also their holy duty to their god, to extort, enslave, and murder all the non-muslims in the world, simply for the “crime” of not being muslims:

“Slay the non-muslims wherever you find them,” (Qur'an 9:5), “Strike upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip,” (Qur'an 8:12) and “Fight them until there is no unbelief and the religion, all of it, is for Allah” (Qur'an 8:39).

And they have no choice - islam isn't cafeteria catholicism, it's all or nothing (sura 2:85) and so if they give evidence they aren't toeing the line, the others must murder them for hypocrisy (4:86).

Therefore all muslims call them selves "muslims" and not "islamists," or "radicals," or "moderates!"

So the Qur'an is a clearly-written, us-versus-them hate-crime book, endorsing a permanent might-makes-right death-threat. In fact, it's quite accurate to note that the Qur'an is what you'd get if Hitler had written the Bible.

Again: The Qur'an tells it's muslim mind-slaves that they are in fact SO "superior" to all the non-members of their war and plunder cult, that it's not only their right, but also their holy duty to their god, to extort, enslave, and murder all the non-muslims in the world, simply for the "crime" of not being muslims!

So "muslims" are nothing more than criminals, pedophile murderers who dress up in the robes and beards of religious men, waving fake bibles, yelling about "god" to cover up their criminal natures to get closer to their victims.

ALL muslims are criminals, as being members of the ancient, ongoing global extortion racket called islam. In sharia law texts, muslims are SUPPOSED to be regarded as threats (as "objects of fear") by all the unbelievers, whether or not the individual muslim has itself actually committed any crimes.

(As documented in the Hedaya, Volume II, Book IX, INSTITUTES, on pages 154 & 157); Qur'an 8:57 & 60.

That's why we have laws against simply being a MEMBER of a crime-gang or 'criminal enterprise' because their general membership endorses and represents the inherent threat the gang presents. Threats are crimes in themselves: they are psychological attacks, also known as intimidation, bullying, coercion, duress, harassment, activist agitation, extortion, and “terrorism.”

And even any “only" attempted crimes are still considered by civilized people to be crimes.

Here’s islam’s “holy Message from god” as exemplified by the collective words and deeds of it’s Founder:

“I will save humanity by lying to, extorting, torturing, robbing, burning out of their homes, kidnapping and ransoming, enslaving, raping and murdering everyone who even only verbally disagrees with me – and you can, too!”

- Muhammad -

Muhammad was really only a con-man and bandit-king, an arch-criminal who always blamed “god” for his own penchant for committing crimes. If Moe got away with committing a crime (and he tried them all, enthusiastically, more than once, but instead of ever showing contrition, bragged about how much fun it was to commit them, and advised everyone else to join in the fun, too), then it was held to be “obvious” that “god” wanted him to get away with having committed those crimes!

And since "allah" forced him to commit them, they were never really "crimes" at all in the first place!

Everything muslims pretend to see as "holy" is already a crime!

Why did Muhammad really hate both dogs and pictures of himself? Probably only because he was a career criminal constantly on the run from the Meccan authorities, so he detested tracking dogs and wanted-posters with his picture on them.

Bottom line? Islam is not a “religion” (at all, much less one “of peace”) nor is it a “race” (at all, much less one of “Poor, Oppressed, People Of Colour”)!

Obviously, islam is ONLY an ancient, ongoing extortion-racket CRIME-syndicate, and the only “religious” part in it, is where its holy-mobster crime-gang members say:

“God told us to commit these crimes!”

(Capisce?)!

;-)

The Qur’an clearly and very specifically tells muslims the Bible is wrong and also that all Christians and Jews are infidel criminals who worship a false god, and who must therefore be extorted, enslaved, and murdered for their “crime” of not being muslims:

Sura (Chapter) 47:1-4 of the Qur'an:

1: non-muslims are bad, (allegedly because they insult allah by dividing his nature*);
2: muslims are good, (allegedly because to them allah is the cause of everything*);
3: Allah made them both like that;
4: So muslims should chop off the non-muslims' heads.
("Allah could have done it himself, but he wants you muslims to do it for him").
...

It's all right there, in context: islamic violence is entirely general doctrine-driven, and not at all specific grievance-driven.

(And chapter 47 isn't by any stretch even remotely the worst, most violent chapter; that honor goes to either chapter 8 or 9; 9:29 demands all non-muslims be fought, extorted, and enslaved because they don't believe in Muhammad's 'allah').
That is, the Qur'an demands muslims wage offensive war - not in self-defense - but because of others' "disbelief!"


So don't go looking for what actions of yours may have offended or provoked them; they have been taught from birth that your existence alone offends their god, and so should offend them.

Muslims have been officially taught to believe that they are the “best of people” (Qur’an 3:110) and that unbelievers are the “most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6).

-------
*[Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority: their abode will be the Fire: And evil is the home of the wrong-doers! (3:151)].

...

So, if and when you consider islam to be a religion, you must agree with it’s main tenet: that God is a violent murderer who wants his muslim tribe to violently conquer the world by extorting, enslaving, and murdering all the non-muslim humans, right?

At WORST, all REAL religions only say:

"Obey our silly rules, or GOD (/'the gods') will get you!"

...but ONLY islam says:

"Obey our silly rules, or WE will get you ('for god')!"

A forced 'Faith!' ISN'T a "Faith!" at all - it's only extortion, and extortion is always a CRIME.

Bottom line: Muslims must be told straight out, unequivocally: "If you decide to believe in "allah," you have declared yourself a criminal, and so must be arrested, indicted, tried and convicted. Your confession of "faith" in your crime-god will help us to do so."

=======

Further, here are some more teachings from the Koran, “valid from eternity to eternity”:

2:191 Slay the unbelievers wherever you come upon them.
9:5 Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.
2:98 Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers.
30:45 Allah does not love the unbelievers.
3:28 Muslims must not take the infidels as friends.
3:85 If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah) it will never be accepted.
8:12 Cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
8:60 And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy.
4:89 Anyone trying to leave islam must be murdered for it.

Got that  yet? “Kill them wherever you find them!” is from (2:191, 4:89, AND 9:5).

There really is not any room for doubt. Islam is a MURDER-gang / extortion racket posing as religion.


....

The ultimate aim of islam is to MURDER US!

Once they have the world, their scriptures declare that the “pay the jizya” protection racket option will become null and void, leaving only “convert or DIE!”

That’s their own, officially declared end-game aim!

Why not skip all the intermediate steps, as so many of them obviously feel perfectly god-mandatedly free to do, and cut to the chase?!

How do you compromise with an existential enemy Hellbent on genocide?
7.167, 8.67, 47.4 Sahih Bukhari 4.52.177

How does one 'compromise' with declared assassins and robbers?

Agree to let them only half-kill you? To kill "only" half of your family?

Allow them to only steal half your stuff (today, and half again tomorrow)?

When is enough suicidally masochistic appeasement enough, to liberals?

Trump and Israel: Enemies of the System

Trump and Israel: Enemies of the System
May 22, 2017     Caroline Glick

The United States is sailing in uncharted waters today as the intelligence-security community wages an all-but-declared rebellion against President Donald Trump.

Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein’s decision on Wednesday to appoint former FBI director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating allegations of “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” is the latest and so far most significant development in this grave saga.

Who are the people seeking to unseat Trump? This week we learned that the powers at play are deeply familiar. Trump’s nameless opponents are some of Israel’s greatest antagonists in the US security establishment.

This reality was exposed this week with intelligence leaks related to Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. To understand what happened, let’s start with the facts that are undisputed about that meeting.

The main thing that is not in dispute is that during his meeting with Lavrov, Trump discussed Islamic State’s plan to blow up passenger flights with bombs hidden in laptop computers.

It’s hard to find fault with Trump’s actions. First of all, the ISIS plot has been public knowledge for several weeks.

Second, the Russians are enemies of ISIS. Moreover, Russia has a specific interest in diminishing ISIS’s capacity to harm civilian air traffic. In October 2015, ISIS terrorists in Egypt downed a Moscow-bound jetliner, killing all 254 people on board with a bomb smuggled on board in a soda can.

And now on to the issues that are in dispute.

Hours after the Trump-Lavrov meeting, The Washington Post reported that in sharing information about ISIS’s plans, Trump exposed intelligence sources and methods to Russia and in so doing, he imperiled ongoing intelligence operations carried out by a foreign government.

The next day, The New York Times reported that the sources and methods involved were Israeli. In sharing information about the ISIS plot with Lavrov, the media reported, Trump endangered Israel.

There are two problems with this narrative.

First, Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster insisted that there was no way that Trump could have exposed sources and methods, because he didn’t know where the information on the ISIS plot that he discussed with Lavrov originated.

Second, if McMaster’s version is true – and it’s hard to imagine that McMaster would effectively say that his boss is an ignoramus if it weren’t true – then the people who harmed Israel’s security were the leakers, not Trump.

Now who are these leakers? According to the Washington Post, the leakers are members of the US intelligence community and former members of the US intelligence community, (the latter, presumably were political appointees in senior intelligence positions during the Obama administration who resigned when Trump came into office).

Israel is no stranger to this sort of operation. Throughout the Obama administration, US officials illegally leaked top secret information about Israeli operations to the media.

In 2010, a senior defense source exposed the Stuxnet computer worm to the New York Times. Stuxnet was reportedly a cyber weapon developed jointly by the US and Israel. It was infiltrated into the computer system at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. It reportedly sabotaged a large quantity of centrifuges at the installation.

The revelation of Stuxnet’s existence and purpose ended the operation. Moreover, much of Iran’s significant cyber capabilities were reportedly developed by reverse engineering the Stuxnet.

Obama made his support for the leak clear three days before he left office. On January 17, 2017, Obama pardoned Marine Gen. James Cartwright for his role in illegally divulging the Stuxnet program to the Times.

In 2012, US officials told the media that Israel had struck targets in Syria. The leak, which was repeated several times in subsequent years, made it more dangerous for Israel to operate against Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria.

Also in 2012, ahead of the presidential election, US officials informed journalists that Israel was operating in air bases in Azerbaijan with the purpose of attacking Iran’s nuclear sites in air strikes originating from those bases.

Israel’s alleged plan to attack Iran was abruptly canceled.

In all of these cases, the goal of the leak was to harm Israel.

In contrast, the goal of this week’s leaks was to harm Trump. Israel was collateral damage.

The key point is that the leaks are coming from the same places in both cases.

All of them are members of the US intelligence community with exceedingly high security clearances. And all of them willingly committed felony offenses when they shared top secret information with reporters.

That is, all of them believe that it is perfectly all right to make political use of intelligence to advance a political goal. In the case of the anti-Israel leaks under Obama, their purpose was to prevent Israel from degrading Iran’s nuclear capacity and military power at a time that Obama was working to empower Iran at Israel’s expense.

In the case of the Trump-Lavrov leak, the purpose was to undermine Israel’s security as a means of harming Trump politically.

What happened to the US intelligence community? How did its members come to believe that they have the right to abuse the knowledge they gained as intelligence officers in order to advance a partisan agenda? As former CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger explained in an article published in March in The Hill, the Obama administration oversaw a program of deliberate politicization of the US intelligence community.

The first major step toward this end was initiated by then-US attorney general Eric Holder in August 2009.

Holder announced then that he intended to appoint a special counsel to investigate claims that CIA officers tortured terrorists while interrogating them.

The purpose of Holder’s announcement wasn’t to secure indictments. The points was to transform the CIA politically and culturally.

And it worked.

Shortly after Holder’s announcement, an exodus began of the CIA’s best operations officers. Men and women with years of experience operating in enemy territory resigned.

Uehlinger’s article related that during the Obama years, intelligence officers were required to abide by strict rules of political correctness.

In his words, “In this PC world, all diversity is embraced – except diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.”

Over the years, US intelligence officers at all levels have come to view themselves as soldiers in an army with its own agenda – which largely overlapped Obama’s.

Trump’s agenda on the other hand is viewed as anathema by members of this powerful group. Likewise, the notion of a strong Israel capable of defending its interests without American help and permission is more dangerous than the notion of Iran armed with nuclear weapons.

Given these convictions, it is no surprise that unnamed intelligence sources are leaking a tsunami of selective and deceptive intelligence against Trump and his advisers.

The sense of entitlement that prevails in the intelligence community was on prominent display in an astounding interview that Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, gave to MSNBS in early March.

Farkas, who resigned her position in late 2015 to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, admitted to her interviewer that the intelligence community was spying on Trump and his associates and that ahead of Obama’s departure from office, they were transferring massive amounts of intelligence information about Trump and his associates to Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill in order to ensure that those Democratic politicians would use the information gathered to harm Trump.

In her words, “The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealings with Russians… would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that information.”

Farkas then explained that the constant leaks of Trump’s actions to the media were part of the initiative that she had urged her counterparts to undertake.

And Farkas was proud of what her colleagues had done and were doing.

Two days after Farkas’s interview, Trump published his tweet accusing former president Barack Obama of spying on him.

Although the media and the intelligence community angrily and contemptuously denied Trump’s assertion, the fact is that both Farkas’s statement and information that became public both before and since Trump’s inauguration lends credence to his claim.

In the days ahead of the inauguration we learned that in the summer of 2016, Obama’s Justice Department conducted a criminal probe into suspicions that Trump’s senior aides had committed crimes in their dealings with Russian banks. Those suspicions, upon investigation, were dismissed. In other words, the criminal probe led nowhere.

Rather than drop the matter, Obama’s Justice Department decided to continue the probe but transform it into a national security investigation.

After a failed attempt in July 2016, in October 2016, a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court approved a Justice Department request to monitor the communications of Trump’s senior advisers. Since the subjects of the probe were working from Trump’s office and communicating with him by phone and email, the warrant requested – which the FISA court granted – also subjected Trump’s direct communications to incidental collection.

So from at least October 2016 through Trump’s inauguration, the US intelligence community was spying on Trump and his advisers, despite the fact that they were not suspected of committing any crimes.

This brings us back to this week’s Russia story which together with the media hysteria following Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, precipitated Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating the allegations that Trump and or his advisers acted unlawfully or in a manner that endangered the US in their dealings with Russia.

It is too early to judge how Mueller will conduct his investigation. But if the past is any guide, he is liable to keep the investigation going indefinitely, paralyzing Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy in relation to Russia and a host of other issues.

This then brings us to Trump and Israel – the twin targets of the US intelligence community’s felonious and injurious leaks.

The fact that Trump will be coming to Israel next week may be a bit of fortuitous timing. Given the stakes involved for Trump, for Israel and for US national security, perhaps Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can develop a method of fighting this cabal of faceless, lawless foes together.

How such a fight would look and what it would involve is not immediately apparent and anyways should never be openly discussed. But the fact is that working together, Israel and Trump may accomplish more than either can accomplish on their own. And with so much hanging in the balance, it makes sense to at least try.                        

There Is NO "Political Spectrum!"

There is no "political spectrum!"

No such thing as a "centrist:" one's EITHER an extortive gangster slaver (socialist/fascist/muslim aka a criminal,) OR a proud law-abiding individualist (conservative)!

Just as there are only two "cultures" in nature: that of the predatory criminal aggressors (who always attack first) and that of the civilized law-abiding symbiotes, who collaborate for mutual enlightenment and to solve mutual problems!

And so, only the civilized, co-operative (or at least, non-aggressive) one of these is actually "cultured;" the other is only a crime.

Islam is only the world's largest and oldest, ongoing extortion-racket crime-gang: it's not a "culture," "race,"  "ethnicity" or even a "civilization" at all! It's only a savage barbarism; an extortion racket crime-cult gang.

So all criminally negligent infantile delinquent habitually entitled libertine "liberal" criminals' mottos are:

"When in Doubt, Always blame others!" and since there's always "doubt," it also means: "Always attack first!"

The libertine "liberal" criminal left's "social contract" is one of safe static slavery, where they give up and defer their freedom for security. (For proof of this, see the works of Rousseau, who coined the term for them).

Idolatry is Victimology (aka islam): for if with great power comes great responsibility, then with no power comes no responsibility! If and when a mysterious unknown and unknowable (yet somehow also "inevitable") force is behind everything we do - whether it be Marx's "historical predeterminism" or the "will of allah" then the false moral high ground applies: "If I say you're better than me, then it's all your fault! And since it's all your fault, therefore nothing is my fault, so I'm still better than you! Whee!"

This corruptive delinquency applies to ALL "religions!" ALL "gods" are idols and alibis to excuse delinquency.

As masochists (defeatist, would-be martyrs) libertines insist they can "always do what we want, not what we merely should or have to do!" to avoid having to do what's right: to painfully have to take the time to figure out and discriminate bad from good choices, and to risk becoming wrong. So they insist it's their right to always remain irresponsibly wrong, and that the best solution is to instantly compromise with, quickly submit to, and "shrewdly" become a part of the "inevitable" problem! This they call "Freedom!" (from responsibility) and "Liberty," and is why they describe being ever-more irresponsible by stealing ever-more rights, "Progress!"

Since they refuse to do what's expected (since they always fearfully expect to fail) they demand "tolerance" for "diversity" (by which they mean doing things "differently" but where their sacred Difference is really only the difference between being factually correct, and being merely politically correct, aka remaining factually WRONG).

Their stance of perpetual fear-focused and fear-based stasis leaves them like truculent defiant infants who never want to take any personal responsibility for their free-will choices, always blame and pretend to defer to their parental-like "authority" idols as alibis to excuse their own criminally negligent delinquency, refusing to grow up and fend for them selves. Thus their habitual victim-blaming slanderous extortion allows them to fail upwards.

Never accepting responsibility also means always creating and never solving problems, so their real motto also seems to be "There's No Money In Solutions, so Please Give Generously - AGAIN!"

Their perpetual extortive slander allows them to keep their victims on the defensive, and effectively enslaved.

All hypocrites are criminals, and all criminals are hypocrites, advising their victims that suicidal masochism is the highest moral virtue, and that accusing "other victims" of being "criminals" should be the only real "crime."

Thus proudly and "pre-emptively, defensively" defeating them selves, they also defeat society and civilization.

They are traitors to rationality and civilization, and as they are proudly non-compus-mentis, should be taken at their words ("Since we can't understand the complexities of cause and effect, all facts are only opinions, so our entirely fact-free, subjective opinions are the diversely opposite equals to your silly objective facts! Whee!").

Their "anything goes" immoral relativism is dangerous to sane logical and reasonable people's hopes for success.

They should not be allowed to vote nor sign contracts or own property, much less to teach (abuse) any children.

They should be confined to re-education camps until their habitual entitled masochism is worked out of them.

They must learn to move beyond remaining stuck at the antithesis from any given hypothesis, to the syntheses.

They must be taught to understand the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows of cause and effect again.

They must be taught and tested in category thinking, and those criminals who insist on failing, to maintain their crime-excuses, may remain slaves to civilized law-abiding and collaborative problem-solving symbiote citizens.

They must be asked, again and again, as necessary: "Think! Why do you always want hurt feelings to trump facts?"*

Remember: leftopaths feel the best solution to any threat is to instantly give in to it - because then the additional fear of it is over, and "only" the pain remains!

For the real social contract is the Golden Rule of Law, wherein if and when one abdicates one's responsibility to not attack thereby innocent other people first, one then also gives up one's right to not be defensively counter attacked second. There can be no idolatrous standalone "Rights!" without concomitant corollary responsibilities.

Bottom line?

They (criminals, politicians, authorities in general) are all hypocrites who lie to promote their double standards, advising suicidal masochism and no right to self defense as the highest moral virtue for their victims, and to reserve the false right to always attack you first for your own good for them selves.

And people only accept (and crave) authorities to, you guessed it, have rights without responsibility - the right to be cared for as a child or slave, for if with great power comes great responsibility, then with no power comes no responsibility (and so also, only rights)!

SO it doesn't matter what lists of rules or what kind of "system" an "authority" wants to create to bind his slaves to him, it will NEVER work, simply because those he gets to pretend to agree to it, are equally criminal hypocrites, and are only in it for the exact same reasons he or she is: to have rights without responsibility!

;-)

PS: Any and all such "systems" (Marxism; Islam) are merely CRIMES ("Positivist Laws") demanding "positive" rights, aka an equality of outcome over and equality of opportunity; and even in fact demanding a present equality of outcome, in order to guarantee any and all future equalities of opportunity.

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*Who always wants feelings to trump facts?

Only CRIMINALS!

And WHY (you ask)?

The falsely static, idolatrous self-image-enhancing "belief" of all criminals (both muslims and liberals included) is that their subjective feelings (their psychotic, thought-killing stance of slanderous paranoia, that they are always the victims, and everyone else is always an oppressor out to get them, so they alone are always entitled to ever-more rights, and ever-less responsibilities than everyone else; and in fact, to be "fair," in the interests of "Diverse Equality," everyone else should have no rights over them at all, and only extorted responsibilities ensuring that they will remain enslaved to the criminals) trump the real objective facts, (that their same choice of "belief," in its attempt to pre-define them as victims, really ever in fact only pre-defines them selves as the predatory criminal aggressors, and those they slander with their paranoia as their innocent victims) every time!

And criminals are especially "offended" and are most likely to have their feelings hurt when their victims get angry ("hateful") with them, just because they tried to commit some "crimes" against them!

So, while only real victims will get angry when criminals try to victimize them, only the pretend victims (aka psychotic, idolatrous hypocritical predatory slanderous criminal extortionist aggressors) will pretend that being accused of crimes "offends them and hurts their feelings" and so only criminals will try to ban anger ("Hate!") at ongoing injustices.

Canadian Politicians Pander to Muslim ASSASSIN CHIEF

From here and here:

Cohen: It'll take more than the Conservatives to sully the Aga Khan's stellar reputation

Andrew Cohen
More from Andrew Cohen

Published on: May 16, 2017 | Last Updated: May 16, 2017 9:36 AM EDT

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with the Aga Khan on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, May 17, 2016. Trudeau's vacation with the Aga Khan is being probed by the ethics commissioner. Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Since January, we have been talking about Justin Trudeau and his tropical holiday with the Aga Khan. As June approaches, we are still talking about it. Sad.

Trudeau says he will recuse himself from the appointment of the new ethics commissioner, who, lucky duck, will inherit the two investigations initiated by the departing Mary Dawson. We are left in suspense. Cruel.

Did the prime minister break the rules in taking a free ride on a helicopter to the Aga Khan’s Bahamian island? Was it unethical to accept a few days in the sun with him?
As the waters rise or recede in sodden communities, the opposition chooses new leaders and hackers wage cyber-warfare on our institutions, this is what matters to us: the prime minister’s winter vacation. Odd.

It goes on and on, critics crying scandal, as if this were Donald Trump firing James Comey. It is classic Canada: earnest, aggrieved, jealous and prissy, finding grave impropriety in personal misjudgment. Our accountants of envy are on the march, again.

The parade’s new grand marshal is John Baird, former minister of foreign affairs. Worried about the reputation of the Aga Khan, whom he reveres, he warns that it would be “a perilous mistake to conflate this important partnership and this great man … with the excesses of the élite.”

In a recent commentary in The National Post, he gets up on his low horse to declare with Olympian certainty: “It is unforgivable that the irresponsible decisions of one individual could threaten to tarnish an exceptional leader’s lifetime of global statesmanship.”

Good for Baird for saluting the Aga Khan, a unique philanthropist and humanitarian. Baird does not mention Justin Trudeau; he prefers, archly, to call him “one individual.” Now an elder statesman, the brash Baird is more subtle.

But when this story broke last January, it was the Conservatives – Baird’s former colleagues – who treated the Aga Khan with the ignominy with which Baird treats Trudeau. Delighted to beat up the prime minister, it was they, not Trudeau, who “tarnished” the Aga Khan.

It was less what they said than what they didn’t. To Andrew Scheer, inquisitor-in-chief, the Aga Khan is “the beneficiary of tens of millions in government contributions” and received $30 million for his headquarters in Ottawa.

“We need to know if it is appropriate for Trudeau to accept gifts from someone whose foundation receives funds from the Government of Canada,” he harrumphed in a letter on Jan. 8.

To Scheer, who soils himself to be party leader, the Aga Khan is “a private individual.”

Someone? Private individual? Beneficiary? Can we recognize in anything Sheer says even a hint of Baird’s veneration of “no one alive today I respect more or hold in higher esteem.”

It was convenient for Sheer to paint the Aga Khan as anonymous, even faintly grubby or shady. Yet it was the Conservatives who made the Aga Khan an honorary citizen and invited him to address Parliament, signal accolades both.

Baird’s Aga Khan was behind “the multi-million-dollar rehabilitation” of the former war museum and Dominion Archives, which re-opened this week as the Aga Khan’s Global Centre for Pluralism. He founded the Aga Khan "Museum" (Tolerance Mosque) in Toronto.

To Baird, the Aga Khan is a giver. To Scheer, he is a taker.

Both know the truth about this: Justin Trudeau and his brood took a holiday with an old family friend Trudeau admires as much as Baird does. Trudeau, zealous about his privacy, should have disclosed his plans and the government should have paid his way, where necessary, for his security. He has since reimbursed part of the costs.

More important, Trudeau and Canada should celebrate at every turn his and our relationship with His Highness the Aga Khan. Only good things come of it at home and abroad. No one seriously believes he wanted anything from Justin Trudeau – except, perhaps, another suggestion on how he can enrich and elevate our little country.

============

John Baird: The noble work of the Aga Khan should not be tarnished by this Canadian political scandal

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John Baird, Special to National Post | May 15, 2017 3:19 PM ET
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Prakash Singh / AFP / Getty ImagesThe Aga Khan smiles during a meeting, May 12, 2008

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His Highness the Aga Khan is a remarkable human being and a force for pluralism in a world besieged by tyranny. At 80 years of age, he is now the longest living spiritual leader in the Islamic world, and a jewel for Canada as our own honourary citizen. His statesmanship has shaped the course of history — in the midst of the Cold War, he bridged Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in his relentless pursuit for peace.

A lot of attention and media has recently been concentrated on the Aga Khan. Let me tell you about the Aga Khan I have come to know, who I have come to deeply respect and admire, and who continues to be a powerful and irreplaceable force for good in a dangerous world.

Under the previous government, Canada invested in crucial development programming across the world that materially impacted the lives of the most imperiled. From Africa to the Middle East and Asia, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) is a shining model. International aid agencies the world over aspire to achieve the effectiveness of the AKDN’s initiatives.

The Government of Canada and Aga Khan Foundation Canada have jointly funded initiatives that have improved the quality of life of well over a million people in some of the most marginalized places in the world over the last decade — helping people with jobs and income, spurring entrepreneurship, improving health care and education even in some of the world’s most remote locations. In East Africa alone, over 300,000 children are benefiting from improved education, and a new hospital in central Afghanistan will serve a population of 400,000, most of whom are women and children. The AKDN pioneers new and powerful ways to creating lasting change, paralleled perhaps only by the Gates Foundation.

This has not been a one-way street. Across Canada, the Aga Khan’s public parks and centres add to the rich tapestry of our national life.

In partnership with Canada’s Global Centre for Pluralism, His Highness has funded the multi-million-dollar rehabilitation of one of the capital’s critical heritage buildings, the former War Museum and Dominion Archives in Ottawa, saving it from disrepair and giving it a new global vocation.

The cultural complex and architectural treasure in Toronto that includes the establishment of the Aga Khan Museum, Ismaili Centre, and Aga Khan Park is another contribution. The construction of this world-class site provided 1.5 million hours of construction work during an economic downturn, engaging over a 100 subcontractors and dozens of Canadian suppliers. The opening of the museum was itself covered in media across over 50 countries and became Lonely Planet’s top reason to visit Toronto.

An ongoing demonstration of the remarkable symmetry between Canada and the Aga Khan was consecrated by prime minister Stephen Harper and the Aga Khan in the Canada-Ismaili Imamat Protocol of Understanding prior to the Aga Khan’s remarkable address in Parliament. The protocol shapes diplomatic, development and other joint ventures between Canada and the Ismaili Imamat around the world.

It would be a perilous mistake to conflate this important partnership and this great man, one that continues make a meaningful difference, with the excesses of the elite. Prime ministers and senior representatives are often afforded generous gestures; the responsibility to decline them politely rests on the public office holder.

The Aga Khan embodies Canadian values. There is no one alive today who I respect more or hold in higher esteem. His counsel during my tenure as foreign minister provided rare perspectives that can only be accrued by a man of his stature, having witnessed the world for as long as he has. It is unforgivable that the irresponsible decisions of one individual could threaten to tarnish an exceptional leader’s lifetime of global statesmanship.

Hon. John R. Baird, P.C., a senior adviser at Bennett Jones LLP, is a former minister of foreign affairs.

==============

WOW!~ It must be confusing and disturbing to the Ismaeli's ASSASSINS-CHIEF as he takes his much-needed Bahamian vacations away from his blood-soaked throne of human skulls atop Mount Alamut, to read in your liberal rags about exactly how much he is now being "disrespected" in Canada, after had we conned him into thinking we were his friends by Submitting our former War Museum building and lands in downtown Ottawa to him, at our gullible taxpayers' expense, for his new "Diversity Centre," after we had already given him a multi-million dollar"Tolerance Mosque" in Toronto.

Because nothing screams "Tolerance and Diversity!" like hosting the muslim Assassin's sect here, no?

;-)

The Left’s War on Free Speech

From here:

Hillsdale College's IMPRIMIS magazine and site don't host comments, so here you go!

Kimberley Strassel
Author, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

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Kimberley Strassel writes the weekly “Potomac Watch” column for The Wall Street Journal, where she is also a member of the editorial board. A graduate of Princeton University, her previous positions at the Journal include news assistant in Brussels, internet reporter in London, commercial real estate reporter in New York, assistant editorial features editor, columnist for OpinionJournal.com, and senior editorial page writer. In 2013 she served as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College, and in 2014 she was a recipient of the Bradley Prize. She is the author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 26, 2017, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

I like to introduce the topic of free speech with an anecdote about my children. I have three kids, ages twelve, nine, and five. They are your average, normal kids—which means they live to annoy the heck out of each other.

Last fall, sitting around the dinner table, the twelve-year-old was doing a particularly good job at this with his youngest sister. She finally grew so frustrated that she said, “Oliver, you need to stop talking—forever.” This inspired a volley of protests about free speech rights, and ended with them yelling “shut up” at each other. Desperate to stop the fighting and restore order, I asked each of them in turn to tell me what they thought “free speech” meant.

The twelve-year-old went first. A serious and academic child, he gave a textbook definition that included “Congress shall make no law,” an evocation of James Madison, a tutorial on the Bill of Rights, and warnings about “certain exceptions for public safety and libel.” I was happy to know the private-school fees were yielding something.

The nine-year-old went next. A rebel convinced that everyone ignores her, she said that she had no idea what “public safety” or “libel” were, but that “it doesn’t matter, because free speech means there should never be any restrictions on anything that anybody says, anytime or anywhere.” She added that we could all start by listening more to what she says.

Then it was the five-year-old’s turn. You could tell she’d been thinking hard about her answer. She fixed both her brother and sister with a ferocious stare and said: “Free speech is that you can say what you want—as long as I like it.”

It was at this moment that I had one of those sudden insights as a parent. I realized that my oldest was a constitutional conservative, my middle child a libertarian, and my youngest a socialist with totalitarian tendencies.

With that introduction, my main point today is that we’ve experienced over the past eight years a profound shift in our political culture, a shift that has resulted in a significant portion of our body politic holding a five-year-old’s view of free speech. What makes this shift notable is that unlike most changes in politics, you can trace it back to one day: January 21, 2010, the day the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling and restored free speech rights to millions of Americans.

For nearly 100 years up to that point, both sides of the political aisle had used campaign finance laws—I call them speech laws—to muzzle their political opponents. The Right used them to push unions out of elections. The Left used them to push corporations out of elections. These speech laws kept building and building until we got the mack daddy of them all—McCain-Feingold. It was at this point the Supreme Court said, “Enough.” A five-judge majority ruled that Congress had gone way too far in violating the Constitution’s free speech protections.

The Citizens United ruling was viewed as a blow for freedom by most on the Right, which had in recent years gotten some free speech religion, but as an unmitigated disaster by the Left. Over the decades, the Left had found it harder and harder to win policy arguments, and had come to rely more and more on these laws to muzzle political opponents. And here was the Supreme Court knocking back those laws, reopening the floodgates for non-profits and corporations to speak freely again in the public arena.

In the Left’s view, the ruling couldn’t have come at a worse time. Remember the political environment in 2010. Democrats were experiencing an enormous backlash against the policies and agenda of the Obama administration. There were revolts over auto bailouts, stimulus spending, and Obamacare. The Tea Party movement was in full swing and vowing to use the midterm elections to effect dramatic change. Democrats feared an electoral tidal wave would sweep them out of Congress.

In the weeks following the Citizens United ruling, the Left settled on a new strategy. If it could no longer use speech laws against its opponents,  it would do the next best thing—it would threaten, harass, and intimidate its opponents out of participation. It would send a message: conservatives choosing to exercise their constitutional rights will pay a political and personal price.

We’ve seen this strategy unfold, in a coordinated fashion and using a variety of tactics, since 2010.
One tactic is the unleashing of federal and state bureaucracies on political opponents. The best example of this is the IRS targeting of conservative non-profits. To this day, Obama acolytes and Senate Democrats characterize that targeting as a mistake by a few minor IRS employees in Cincinnati who didn’t understand the law. That is a lie.

Congress held several investigations of this targeting, and the truth is clear. In the months following the Citizens United ruling, President Obama delivered speech after speech on behalf of Democratic midterm candidates, repeating the same grave warning at each stop—thanks to Citizens United, he would say, shadowy and scary organizations are flooding into our elections. He suggested these organizations might be operating illegally and might be funded by foreign players. He noted that somebody should do something about it.

These speeches acted as a dog whistle to an IRS bureaucracy that was already primed to act. Former IRS official Lois Lerner was well aware of Democratic demands that the agency go after conservative Tea Party and non-profit groups. Senate Democrats and left-wing interest groups had been sending letters to the agency for months, demanding it go after the very groups it ultimately went after. And Ms. Lerner had her own biases—we know this from her recoverable emails—that put her politically and substantively in the anti-free speech camp. The result is that the IRS deliberately put some 400 conservative organizations, representing tens of thousands of Americans, on political ice for the 2010 and 2012 elections.

It is hard not to believe that this was designed to help Democrats in those elections. We know that senior members of the Treasury Department were aware of the targeting abuse in early 2012, and took steps to try to slow it. Yet those officials did not inform Congress this was happening, and chose not to divulge the abuse until well after that year’s election.

Another intimidation tactic is for prosecutors to abuse their awesome powers in order to hound and frighten political opponents. The most terrifying example of this was the John Doe probe in Wisconsin. Democratic prosecutors in Milwaukee launched a bogus criminal campaign finance investigation into some 30 conservative groups that supported the public-sector union reforms championed by Governor Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s John Doe law gave these prosecutors the right to conduct this investigation in secret and to subject their individual targets to gag orders. Prosecutors secretly looked through these individuals’ financial records, bank accounts, and emails.

Prosecutors also conducted pre-dawn raids on some of their targets’ homes. In one horrifying instance, the target of such a raid was on an out-of-town trip with his wife, and their teenage son was home alone. Law enforcement came into the house and sequestered the boy, refusing to allow him to call a lawyer or even his grandparents, who lived down the road. They hauled items out of the house, and as they left they told the boy that he too was subject to the gag order—that if he told anyone what had happened to him, he could go to jail.

We only learned of this because one brave target of the probe, Eric O’Keefe, told The Wall Street Journal what was going on. We broke that story, and it became national headline news. But it ultimately took a lawsuit and the Wisconsin Supreme Court to shut down the probe. In its ruling, the Court made clear its view that the probe’s purpose had been intimidation. The prosecutors had been sending the message: if you dare to speak, we will turn your lives into a living hell and potentially put you in prison.

More recently we have seen this tactic in the joint action of 17 state attorneys general, who launched a probe into Exxon and some 100 different groups that have worked with Exxon over the years. The implicit prosecutorial threat: get on board with our climate change agenda or we might bring racketeering charges against you.

A third intimidation tactic is for activist groups to use blackmail against corporations and non-profits in order to silence them. One subject of such attacks was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that works to promote free-market policies at the state level. As a non-profit, it is largely funded by corporate donations. Because it is so successful, it has long been despised by left-wing activist groups.

These groups focused their efforts on ALEC in 2012, in the wake of the tragic shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. ALEC had played a tangential role in crafting the popular stand-your-ground laws that the Left attacked after the shooting. On that basis, left-wing activists branded ALEC a racist organization and threatened to run ad campaigns against its corporate donors, branding them as racists too—unless they stopped funding ALEC. In a coordinated action, Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sent letters to a thousand organizations across the country, demanding to know if they supported ALEC and suggesting they’d get hauled in front of Congress if they did. ALEC lost nearly half of its donors in the space of a few months.

We’ve also seen this tactic employed against private individuals. One such person was Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot, who Barack Obama’s reelection campaign singled out in 2012, following a VanderSloot donation to Mitt Romney. The campaign publicly branded him a disreputable person, painting a target on his back. Not long after that, VanderSloot was audited by the IRS and visited by other federal agencies.

Out in California, left-wing activists targeted donors to the state’s Prop 8 ballot initiative, which supported traditional marriage. They combed through campaign finance records, and put the names and addresses of Prop 8’s donors on a searchable map. Citizens on this list had their cars keyed, their windows broken, their small businesses flash-mobbed, and their voicemails and emails flooded with threats and insults. Some of them even lost their jobs—most notably Brendan Eich, the founder and CEO of Mozilla. In later depositions, many of these targets told lawyers that they wouldn’t donate to future ballot initiatives. So the attacks were successful in silencing them.

Note the use of disclosure in these attacks. We have come to associate transparency and disclosure with good government. But unfortunately, our system of disclosure has been turned on its head. Disclosure was supposed to enable citizens to keep track of politicians; but if you followed Hillary Clinton’s server scandal, you know that politicians have now become expert at hiding their business. Instead, disclosure is increasingly becoming a tool by which government and political thugs identify people and organizations who oppose them.


Sadly, our federal judiciary has refused to honor important precedents that protect anonymity in politics—most notably the famous 1958 case, NAACP v. Alabama. In that case, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against the Alabama attorney general, who had demanded a list of the state’s NAACP members. The civil rights group knew this was tantamount to making targets of its members in a state that was riven at the time with race-related violence. The Court held that some level of anonymity is sometimes required to protect the rights of free speech and free assembly. The Court expanded on this precedent until the Watergate scandal, when it too got caught up in the disclosure fad. Political privacy rights have been eroding ever since.

What is to be done? For starters, we need to be aware that this is happening, and that it is not random. The intimidation game is very real. It is the work of left-wing groups and politicians, it is coordinated, and it is well-honed. Many of the targets of intimidation who I interviewed for my recent book weren’t aware of what was happening to them, and that allowed the intimidation to go on for too long. Awareness is key.

We need to think hard about ways to limit the powers of the administrative state, to stop rogue agents at the IRS and other agencies from trampling on free speech rights. We can make great progress simply by cutting the size of federal and state bureaucracies. But beyond that, we need to conduct systematic reviews of agency powers and strip from unaccountable bureaucracies any discretion over the political activities of Americans. The IRS should be doing what it was created to do—making sure taxpayers fill out their forms correctly. Period.

We need to push corporations to grow backbones and to defend more aggressively their free speech interests—rather than leaving that defense to others.

We need to overhaul our disclosure laws, and once again put the onus of disclosure on government rather than citizens. At the moment, every American who donates $200 or more to a federal politician goes into a database. Without meaning to sound cynical, no politician in Washington is capable of being bought off for a mere $200. We need to raise that donation threshold. And we need to think hard about whether there is good reason to force disclosure of any donations to ballot initiatives or to the production and broadcast of issue ads—ads designed to educate the public rather than to promote or oppose candidates.

Most important, we need to call out intimidation in any form and manner we see it—and do so instantly. Bullies don’t like to be exposed. They’d rather practice their ugliness in the dark. And one lesson that emerged from all my interviews on this topic is that speaking out works. Those who rolled over merely set themselves up for future attacks. Those who called out the intimidators maintained their rights and won the day.

Finally, conservatives need to tamp down any impulse to practice such intimidation themselves. Our country is best when it is engaging in vigorous debate. The Framers of the Constitution envisioned a multiplicity of interests that would argue their way to a common good. We succeed with more voices, not fewer, and we should have enough confidence in our arguments to hear out our opponents.