In the summer of 2008, 27-year-old Sergio Aguiar stood on the side of a busy country road in California and kicked his infant son to death. Multiple people stopped at the scene to watch the beating, which went on for some time, but did nothing more than call the police and wait. By the time police arrived and killed Aguiar, the infant was so badly disfigured by the savage attack he had to be identified with DNA testing. Some of the witnesses claimed they would have acted had they been armed, but no one seriously believes that because many were armed with tire irons, wheel locking devices, and all the other sundry makeshift weapons found in a car. No, the inaction of these people was not because they couldn’t do anything, but because they didn’t know what they could do. They were residents of a state where self-defense itself is suspect and acting on behalf of others when you yourself are not threatened is an invitation to legal prosecution.

Residents in many states and cities know that they are at the mercy of politically driven prosecutors and government officials anytime they act with force–even if they are justified. Thus, they are trained to not act unless they have no possible alternative to save their lives. We often comment on the callousness of bystanders who do nothing when crimes are being committed, but such apathy is a direct result of the leftist legal theory that people have a legal and moral responsibility to retreat from violence and crime before being “allowed” to act with force. Stand Your Ground laws are a small step toward providing rationality to civil society by recognizing your individual right to protect yourself and others as well as protecting citizens who end up in physical confrontations through acts of good faith.

People like hypocritical NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and professional grievance monger Jesse Jackson are trying to sway public opinion against these laws and reenforce the notion that no matter what is going on you have a duty to retreat from the aggression of criminals.

But think that idea through.

People who did nothing while Sergio Aguiar kicked and stomped an infant to death reported that Aguiar threatened them and they retreated. They did what Bloomberg and Jackson wanted and a child died. For Mayor Bloomberg and Jesse Jackson, this is how civil society should work. If I’m up late, my wife is asleep, and someone kicks in the door, if I can get out the house without confrontation Bloomberg and his ilk want me to abandon my wife to a criminal’s tender mercies. Or if we can both escape, we are morally obligated to allow someone to destroy that which we worked hard to build, steal our hard earned wealth, and desecrate the sanctity of our home–because we have a “duty” to retreat.

Is that a civil society? Is society obligated to retreat from the Sergio Aguiars of the world and be culpable in the death of their victims? Do we really have a duty to spare criminals the repercussions of their criminality?

The left has always maintained just that. It is basic Marxist class conflict theory, taught in every major university under the guise of “sociology” and other so-called social sciences: criminals are the victims of your wealth, your prosperity, your morality, and your goodness. Your desire to protect your property, your family,or an innocent child on the street all conflict with the criminal’s desire to steal, rape, murder, and do evil. Thus, you have a duty to stand aside and allow the most degenerate among us free reign on our streets.

It comes as no surprise Bloomberg would push this view in light of not just his extreme anti-gun positions, but his tacit support for Occupy Wall Street. Bloomberg allowed occupants of a communist-organized encampment to terrorize NYC residents, shut down businesses, and assault and rape people. He only acted against them when public support for the movement amongst the rich liberal elite waned. The supposed Republican mayor implicitly supports that movement through his words, policies, and actions and his attack on stand your ground laws is another facet of that support. His vision of the limitations on your rights is designed to allow mob rule, to give any special interest group that can mobilize an unruly crowd the ability to force you to accept their random demands with threats of violence you cannot defend against and from which the state is unwilling to protect you.

How many lives will be lost when Bloomberg-enforced cowardice is perceived as weakness by these drug addled “revolutionaries” during the coming spring offensive? Criminals are like animals–their attacks are triggered by weakness and fear. Most people attacked by mountain lions are attacked from behind while jogging or riding a bike, which to the big cat looks the same as a prey animal fleeing. The perceived flight from the beast triggers the attack. In the same way, fleeing thugs or giving into them escalates their attacks on your person. Bloomberg and Jackson are advocating behavior that they know will trigger more vicious attacks by criminals, all for political purposes.

In states where there are strong legal protections for citizens defending themselves from threats of any type, OWS has done nowhere near the damage that has been done in places like NYC, Oakland, and other liberal bastions. Zuccotti Park occupiers invaded businesses and assaulted the people within. In Oakland they committed dozens of acts of violence. Occupy has caused tens of millions of dollars in damages that will never be replaced in Obama’s new economy. Bloomberg, Jackson, and their allies are trying to ensure these people can do more damage, that they have free reign to enter your business, your house, and even your personal space and do whatever they want while you are “duty bound” to surrender all you have–your goods, your pride and your dignity–to the neo-bolshevics they intend to put on the street.

And this is in addition to the common street thugs these people want to have absolute sovereignty over your streets, your homes, and ultimately your friends and family. Imagine the world viewed through Bloombergian lenses–you stumble upon a rape in a park and the rapist threatens you. You’re obligated to flee and if you don’t you must rely on the largess of civil servants to stay out of jail. You witness a man beating his wife and if you step in to stop the beating you may face a court date where you have to explain why you didn’t flee as the law requires when the wife beater attacked you. If home invaders kick in your door you should slink out the back while who knows what happens to anyone left in the house because they were too slow. That rape victims, abused wives, and victims of home invasions are routinely murdered can’t be your concern because Michael Bloomberg, Jesse Jackson, and every other thug-hugging social engineer who has a public platform will make sure you’re punished for not following your “duty to retreat” which is nothing more than mandatory cowardice.

Infants like Sergio Aguiar’s son are the price Bloomberg and Jackson are willing to pay for their liberal pretensions and civic power grabs.

A little more than a year after Sergio Aguiar killed his son, a 15-year-old California girl endured a two hour gang rape where she was so badly beaten she needed to be flown to a trauma center. It was widely reported that dozens of people witnessed the attack, but did worse than nothing. They laughed, took pictures, and recorded the attack on cell phones. Reporters were at a loss to explain how such a crime happened but are you? That attack is the end result of Bloomberg’s world view. When state empowers criminals by suppressing the natural rights of all citizens to ensure their own security, barbarity flourishes. For people like Bloomberg this works out well as the powerless citizenry must turn to politicians for safety, and the Jesse Jacksons of the world gain near godlike power by controlling mobs you can’t defend against.

But how does that work out for the rest of us?

Stand Your Ground laws save lives by disempowering criminals. We cannot allow the left to reverse our country’s course toward rational civic life and return us to the days of criminals running the streets.

For many on the right, the argument against Sandra Fluke and her demands that taxpayers foot the bill for the birth control of the children of privilege boils down to sexual morality. While I admit when someone demands that you pay for their contraception their sexual behavior does become your business, the reality is that calling Fluke a slut is not only a losing argument, it misses the point.

I don’t know, or care, if 30-year-old Sandra Fluke is overly promiscuous. I do know that she’s a liar who allowed herself to be portrayed as a 23-year-old co-ed and failed to disclose that she was a long time radical left activist. I don’t know, or care, if she is in a long term relationship or not, but I do know she’s promoting parasitism by the well-to-do who she thinks should be able to feed off working Americans. It doesn’t matter if she is or is not a “slut” because what she is promoting would be wicked and scandalous coming from the most upstanding married woman.

I personally save invectives like “slut” for people like Molly Jane Roe, who in a fit of pique raped and murdered her boyfriend’s infant daughter. I think conservatives would do well to remember that Fluke, as selfish and covetous as she is, is not the worst the left has to offer America. Fluke defenders should also remember that no person has the right to not be judged by their public behavior, even when that judgment may be ill-mannered. But Fluke does deserve the same scorn and ridicule any other rich white person who claims to be oppressed deserves. The idea that she is a victim of a society in which she is in fact the elite should be laughed at and not taken seriously.

But the lack of morality that drives her demands, which are the demands of the left as a whole, needs to be taken seriously and it has little to do with sexual behavior. The left, personified by Fluke, believes it has a right to your property. The left believes that your money, your savings, your insurance, your pensions, your work, and even the wealth of your faith community should all be given to support their often petty and childish desires. Your house and car should be taxed at a higher rate to pay for a 30-year-old’s birth control pills. Your insurance premium should increase so a law student from a wealthy family doesn’t have skip buying drinks or a new purse. Your churches and mosques and temples and other faith communities should be forced by government to violate the basic tenets of their faiths so that people like Fluke can avoid buying generics. I think that kind of immorality is more important than the imaginary promiscuity of a radical feminist activist.

Your savings aren’t keeping up with inflation because the Fed prints money so the parents of people like this don’t lose their shirts on their risky deals. Your 401(k)s are being eyed for Argentina-style government looting because the government is running out of money to dole out to the Flukes of the world and the productive classes are being portrayed as villains and targeted with threats of violence. But Sandra Fluke’s supposed sex partners are the problem?

Fluke isn’t a slut, she’s a thief. She’s advocating the view that people on the left shouldn’t have to pay for things they can afford. She demanding that people who are struggling in our economy subsidize her extended adolescence through being taxed heavily and being forced into a contract we aren’t interested in. She’s looking us all in the eye and telling us her goal is to steal from us, and to steal resources from the truly needy as she and people like her milk the system even though they are able to care for themselves.

Would that view be more moral if she was married and went to church every Sunday? Would it be more moral if she was celibate? Would her economic politics of envy and greed be more palatable coming from a social conservative? Sandra Fluke is saying that she shouldn’t have to sacrifice to achieve her law degree; instead, society must sacrifice for her to be comfortable while she spends her 20s and 30s sheltered in an increasingly immature and irrelevant academia. Sandra Fluke is part of a growing neo-aristocracy that expects to be continuously financially supported by the masses while she attends salons and makes the rules for how much of our own hard earned wealth she will allow us to keep. That’s the real issue and all this angst about her theoretical lack of sexual morality distracts Americans from how dangerous her ideas truly are.

Islam is not a religion of peace and dealing with Islamic cultures as if it is will never bring about peace. The deadly riots in Afghanistan, supposedly caused by the burning of Korans that Muslims themselves were already defacing with secret messages, prove that Islam in its current unreformed state is a nihilistic, dishonest death cult. Worse, Islamism of this sort is encouraged by fickle, bloodless Western powers who are only too eager to accept behavior that even the Muslim actors themselves know is outrageous.

This is not to say there aren’t Muslims who want to live peaceful, modern lives. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser has long spoken out for reformation of Islam and promoted a Western vision for Muslim life that includes becoming tolerant and productive citizens. The Ahmadi Muslim sect has long preached against jihadism and promoted love and kindness for non-Muslims. Of course, the Ahmadis are the victims of a worldwide campaign of genocide and even conservatives marginalize Dr. Jasser at the behest of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated “conservative activists” who claim there can be peace between Militant Islam and the West.

This is a lie and acceptance of this lie endangers our way of life.

Militant Islam does not want peace between between Muslims and non-Muslims. The theology of every major Islamic school school of jurisprudence, sect and organization calls for eternal war between Muslim lands, the so-called house of Islam, and non-Muslim lands which Muslims still refer to as the house of war.

Even as Afghans murder our military personnel, our leadership is apologizing for the burning of Korans that American taxpayers own and that were being used to pass messages to terrorists. Two officers were murdered inside the Interior Ministry–assuredly by an Afghan police officer or soldier. This after two American soldiers were killed and another four wounded by one of our Afghan “allies” who was wearing a military uniform at the time.

Our news media tells us this is done because Muslims, adherent to the so-called Religion of Peace, are upset by our desecration of their holy book. Iran has called for the burning of the White House and the hanging of our commanders as the only acceptable apology and President Karzai is claiming NATO promised him a public show trial for the soldiers who destroyed Korans. Our military leadership in Afghanistan will be spending some tense weeks wondering if Obama will follow through on NATO’s supposed promise.

Is this the “peace” we envision with Muslims in the future? Is our submission to their outrageous and often random demands encouraging peace or violence? Let’s be clear, none of these Muslims care about Korans being defaced or destroyed. If they did, Korans would not be given to suicide bombers and other terrorists who know they’re going to be shot, blown up, or set alight in combat. They certainly don’t riot when Taliban or Al-Qaeda operatives write secret messages in Korans, which by their standards defaces them. These riots are not about Korans, they’re about Muslims having power over the West. The Koran burning is a pretext to force us to publicly submit to Muslims, which will encourage more Muslims to more violence.

Islam apologists like to tell you the word Islam means peace, but it doesn’t. It means submission and current Muslim theology encourages believers to wage war on the world until we submit to Islamic law, sharia. Muslims are promised “booty” and other rewards for helping the cause of Islamic imperialism and Muslim societies, even those enclaves in the West, are arranged to promote and defend criminality like rape, sexual slavery, and even murder as long as it targets non-believers. There have been no apologies to the West (or the Ahmadi, the Armenians, the Ottoman Greeks, etc) for these atrocities. Just recently Afghan police intercepted a convoy of 41 Afghan children headed off to suicide bombing training camps. This news caused no riots and there was no demand for an apology from the Taliban.

Because they don’t care. Muslim aggrievement is selective and aimed at getting concessions from the West. Money, the honor of shaming a Western power, support for their corrupt regimes–this is what Muslims envision as peace with the West. Modernity and partnerships based on mutual respect–true peace–is not only discouraged by Muslims, but those few Muslims who want those things are slandered and murdered. Westerners do not have the ability to understand why the Muslim world engages in such self-destructive behavior because we see those behaviors as running contrary to the tenets of a peaceful religion.

But when you understand that Islam is a religion of submission, of imperialism, then you see the logic behind the constant provocations and the danger of giving into Muslim demands. When I was receiving my degree in comparative religion I read Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade and was taught that myths matter. Western Civilization’s myths and heroes, from the heroic Greeks to the Arthurian romances to the cowboys of the old West, all sit along a continuum of Western values that have shaped our adherence to certain virtues. We hold honesty in esteem, and mercy. We believe strength comes not just from force of arms, but moral conviction. And we believe in justice and freedom for all people. Even when Western societies have fallen short, our myths, our legends, and our theologies promoted our ideals.

Islamic myth does not promote those virtues. The hero of the Koran is a warlord (and coward) who had a poetess murdered while she breastfed her child, committed genocide, raped captured women, and took child brides. He is Mohammed, the perfect man according to Islamic lore and he often used pretexts to initiate violent massacres of people who had wealth and land he wanted for his new faith. Whereas Western Tradition has always envisioned the “perfect” man to harm none and deal with others with a sense of honor, fairness, and faith, Islamic doctrine rejects those values and instead teaches adherents that no offense against others is unacceptable as long as it’s done, at least in theory, in the name of spreading Islam.

Little wonder then that the Afghans care little for the abuse of their children but riot when books are burned, even though those books were already defaced by Muslims. Perhaps Karzai, knowing we intend to withdraw, seeks a faster more chaotic exit of American forces that would necessarily leave behind millions of dollars in equipment. The Afghan people, encouraged by America’s weakness in the face of Islamic demands, have waited for a pretext to rampage and loot the riches our military and State Department operations have brought to Afghanistan. In a typical leftist spin, a Reuters report claimed armed protesters “took refuge” in local shops. As with the “foragers” of Hurricane Katrina, the media seem intent on hiding the looting and theft (the real driving motivators of the riots) from the public.

Islamists will use any excuse to loot, steal, rape, or murder. It is a myth that Islam, in its current unreformed state, is a religion of peace and accepting that myth prevents the West from effectively dealing with the threat Islamic imperialism poses to American security. It’s time we started dealing with Muslim countries from a position of strength and stopped showing them our weakness through appeasement and apologies. Islamic culture does not respect weakness and these murderous riots and extraordinary demands that we execute our own soldiers for burning a book proves we are seen as weak. The weak can find no peace with Islam, only slavery and death.

In response to the tragic death of Whitney Houston, perennial lounge act Tony Bennett told the world how such a tragedy could be prevented:

“First it was Michael Jackson, then it was Amy Winehouse and now the magnificent Whitney Houston,” Bennett said. “I’d like to have every gentleman and lady in this room commit themselves to get our government to legalize drugs, so you can it from a doctor, not just some gangsters that just sell it under the table.”

This argument is so nonsensical it makes me think Bennett has ulterior motives for wanting drugs legalized. Whitney Houston died of a combination of alcohol and prescription drugs that are already legal:

Whitney Houston died from mixing a cocktail of Xanax and other powerful prescription drugs with alcohol, it has been reported.

Her family has allegedly been told by Los Angeles County Coroner officials there was not enough water in her lungs to conclude she had drowned in her luxury hotel bathtub and in fact died before her head went under water, said gossip website TMZ.

The revelations come as it emerged that her daughter Bobbi Kristina, 18, allegedly fell asleep in a bathtub in the same Beverly Hilton hotel just 24 hours before her mother died. TMZ claims security was called to unlock the door and to help the 18-year-old on that occasion.

[...]

On Thursday she is said to have gone on a ‘wild binge’ where she clashed with security guards. The next evening she ‘partied heavily, drank and chatted loudly’ with friends at the hotel bar.

Bottles of Lorazepam, Valium, Xanax and a sleeping medication were found in the hotel room, it has been claimed.

So much for that theory about doctors being more responsible than pushers. Michael Jackson, who Bennett also mentions, was killed by his doctor turned pusher who doped the addict singer with a dangerous mix of perfectly legal prescription drugs. This was done at the drug addled Jackson’s request.

Heath Ledger overdosed on a combination of legal prescription drugs to which he was addicted. For all her public troubles with illegal drugs, Amy Winehouse actually died of alcohol poisoning. I would remind Mr. Bennett that alcohol is quite legal.

In non-celebrity drug abuse news, a woman named Debra Annemarie Blackmon pimped out her 13-year-old daughter to a drug dealer in return for drugs. Not illegal drugs, these were the perfectly legal prescription drugs Oxycodone and Percocet. Marijuana does show up in this story though–the dealer used it to make the girl more compliant before raping her.

It’s almost as if the social ills we find related to drug abuse have less to do with the legal status of a drug and more to do with the addictions, habits, and moral decay of drug users.

I have found that conservatives seem to have lost interest in drug policy issues in the last few years, which is understandable given the other issues we face. Yet ceding this issue to liberals and libertarians is not possible for any conservative who understands the import of our crumbling social fabric. I am against legalization because it makes the government both your pusher and your babysitter, it both incentivizes your drug use and makes society at large–through the instrument of government–responsible for ensuring your safety. I’m not against decriminalization if we lived in a society where drug users would be disqualified from things like driving cars, fostering children, working as teachers and the like. But drug abuse, and death by overdose, is a cultural and societal problem that cannot be fixed by legislation.

Tony Bennett illustrates the true drug problem in America which is our lack of real education about drug abuse. None of the deaths he complains about would have been stopped by legalizing illegal drugs. People don’t abuse drugs because the drugs are illegal, they abuse drugs because they are addicts or troubled or in some cases because they’ve been told by groups like NORML that drug abuse is consequence-less.

This message of consequence-free drug use–the mythical “victimless crime”–has seeped into every part of our culture. We have doctors prescribing highly addictive drugs like Xanax to children and wonder why death by drug overdose is on the rise. We have spent more than 50 years teaching children though our education, media, and behavior that drug and alcohol abuse is relatively minor. And now conservatives have exited the stage and allowed the national discourse on drug policy to be dominated by specious arguments that are based on the politicization of drug-seeking behavior.

It’s time to reengage the drug war as not just a legal issue, but an educational, cultural, and moral issue for which conservatism is the answer. The Tony Bennetts of the world cannot be allowed to spread these Cheech and Chongisms to another vulnerable generation.

In the past few weeks a number of well-connected, celebrity pundits–what we might call the elite–have opined about how ignorant, backward, and self-destructive we unsophisticated rubes who support Newt Gingrich are. People like myself (and Thomas Sowell) are destroying conservatism and working for the election of Barack Obama, according to the great conservative thinkers of our time, well represented by the ever reasonable Ann Coulter and always insightful Bret Stephens. We knuckle-draggers who gloss over Newt Gingrich’s personal failings are, according to our self-appointed intellectual betters, missing the big picture.

It’s a small mind that sees the election of Mitt Romney (or Rick Santorum) as the big picture. Barack Obama is not the cause of the problems our country faces now, he is the result of the problems our country has allowed to fester for decades. Our economic crisis, our waning influence in the world, and the unraveling of our civil society are the result of decades of destruction of our culture from within by Marxism, Liberalism, Libertine-ism and post-modernism. Our dire economic straits and political dysfunction are symptoms of the cultural decline Americans, and specifically conservatives, have ignored for far too long. We cannot save America through policies alone but through a re-dedication of ourselves to the American values that made us the greatest civilization in the world.

Romney supporters, when they take time out from denigrating anyone who doesn’t support their candidate, claim that electing a successful businessman who will tweak our tax policy is the solution to America’s ills. Their proposal is that we happily accept Romney’s promise to slightly slow our decline by helping the productive minority of the country make more money which will be used to support the lavish, unaffordable welfare state that is collapsing our society.

Am I the one missing the big picture when I say that’s not a solution?

In 2009, 51% of Americans paid no federal income taxes and worse, 30% actually made money using wealth redistribution gimmicks like the Earned Income Tax Credit. 30% of Americans are profiting from our tax code, more than half of Americans pay no taxes and are demanding more from the government. Do we solve that with some moderate tax policy, or is this a moral and cultural issue?

The Occupy Wall Street movement has stated plainly that their goal is violent, Arab Spring-style revolution and they’re actively collapsing our city governments through a Cloward-Piven-like strategy of forcing cities to bankrupt themselves policing and cleaning up the devastation of these protests. This civil unrest is not only encouraged by the Left, including politicians in the Democratic Party, it is lionized by our media.

Will Romney’s vast business experience solve this problem? Or will his known antipathy toward our 2nd Amendment rights ultimately encourage more violence?

A 32-year-old woman in New Jersey was arrested for molesting a 5-year-old she was babysitting and streaming the abuse on the Internet. If you read many of the news articles you’ll find a number of commenters who claim this child rapist is a victim of the men to whom she sent child porn. They claim we need to give her treatment and “help” her with her problems. Can this moral decay in our society be fixed with pro-business policies?

The reality is that America’s economic and political problems are symptoms of a cultural problem that no candidate but Gingrich is dealing with. The other candidates have been looking at parts of the puzzle and advocate rearranging the pieces for temporary solutions. But we need a larger movement to return to the American values that would solve those problems. I’m a capitalist and I guarantee you that I’m to the right of many Romney supporters economically. But capitalism isn’t what makes America great; American greatness is what allows capitalism to flourish.

That’s an important distinction between the candidates. I am to to the right of Gingrich on many issues but I stand with him in the belief that America’s decline is not inevitable. We do not need to accept waning influence in the world or decreasing standards of living; we are allowing it to happen. We’re allowing it to happen by abandoning the big ideas and big dreams of a country that was founded on the idea that every American can be exceptional and society’s only responsibility is to ensure that we have the freedom to be exceptional.

More than five thousand years of Western Civilization, from the mysterious Etruscans to the heroic age of Homer to the Republic of Rome to the Enlightenment and everything in between, has led to this one moment in history where one nation – our nation – stands as the pinnacle of Western tradition. America has been and still is the light that shines in a world of darkness and we can continue to be only if we reject national decline. Will we allow Marxism, Liberalism, and post-modernism to end that tradition here as we scramble to postpone our collapse long enough to pass that doom from us to our children? Or will we embrace the big ideas and the spirit that animates them, pushing ourselves to reclaim our greatness? For me that’s the decision and it’s not swayed by what celebrities think about the “electability” of candidates.

Newt Gingrich articulates the conservative ideals we need to reintroduce to so many in our society. Self-reliance, industriousness, and patriotism; these are the virtues that will save America. Conservatives must do more than elect a politician that might believe these things, or some of these things; we must find spokespeople that can make coherent, persuasive arguments for conservatism not just in politics and economics, but in our culture. Without that, we cannot emerge from our current malaise as anything but a second world country violently divided by class warfare. Conservatism is not about being pro-business or anti-business, it’s about a cultural understanding of who we are as a people and a rejection of the chaotic forces of post-modern America which seek to destroy our people from within.

Barack Obama is a symptom of those forces, not the leader of them, and defeating him is only one part of a larger battle no one except Gingrich is willing to take on. That’s the real big picture and the only rubes destroying Conservatism are people who refuse to acknowledge that.

In the last few weeks I’ve been called a neo-con, a Zionist, and a warmonger in various online forums. All by “liberty” supporting Ron Paul fans who insist that history is calling Ron Paul to step forward and rescue America from itself. While I’ve always been on the right I was at one time a Libertarian so I’ll accept the term neo-Con, and since I believe in the historical claim of the Jewish people to Israel I’m fine with being called a Zionist. But it is Ron Paul and his followers who are leading us down the path to world war, not people like me.

The philosophy of Ron Paul and his supporters is simple, straightforward, and ultimately anti-American. They say if we allow evil and depravity to flourish at home and abroad then evil and depraved men will respect us and leave us alone. During the cold war this philosophy was put forward by the left and called accommodation; now it’s been re-branded as “Constitutionalism” but it is no less destructive then it was when voices in our own country called for total surrender to the forces of communism.

Ron Paul believes if we abandoned Israel and let Islamists worldwide take over country after country that Jihadists would never again target America or its citizens. But why would this be? Does Muslim culture respect weakness? Do the mullahs of Iran look favorably on those that kneel before them? Did the Taliban treat women and children with respect? Are the cities of Europe that bowed to Islamist pressures free of Islamist violence?

Paul and his supporters tell us that we should be willing to accommodate Occupy Wall Street, that we can find common ground with the rank and file Occupiers. But what common ground is there between freedom and socialism? Where has accommodating this communist-led attempted coup gotten the cities that tried? How many businesses must be closed down before we stop accommodating them? How many people have to die at these encampments in the name of accommodation?

And when does our accommodation of violent radicals end? After their first murder? After the first riot? Or do we wait for a city to fall to them before drawing a line in the sand?

They say if only we legalized drugs gangs would lay down their arms, put on suits and ties, and become productive members of society. If we legalize prostitution pimps would throw up their hands and go work at K-Marts as women were “empowered” by the legal sex trade. After all, the Mafia all but disappeared after Prohibition, they will argue, ignoring the almost 100 years of murder and extortion the Mafia partook in after the repeal of Prohibition. During their still ongoing reign of terror the Mafia’s activities are partly funded by legal business interests they maintain. Why would today’s gangs do any differently?

Mexican cartels are feudal warlords who control entire sections of both Mexico and America. But if we allow them to sell their drugs legally they’ll give up that power? They’ll give up kingdoms they carved out themselves through murder, rape, and mayhem? Did the Mafia give up control of unions, nightclubs, and gambling?

A 19-year-old girl named Carina Saunders was found dismembered in Oklahoma. A prostitute came forward to tell police that she was kidnapped and taken to a warehouse where she was forced to watch as Saunders was tortured to death. This was a scheme by human traffickers to force the girl and some others to work as their prostitutes. According to the Ron Paul philosophy, legalizing prostitution would turn these animals into productive citizens and prostitutes would be safer. But that view accepts the Marxist theory that criminals are being victimized by an unjust society. In reality our laws don’t create criminals, criminals create the need for our laws.

For 5,000 years Western Civilization has understood that it is strength–strength of character, strength of culture, and strength of arms–that makes it possible for all our other virtues to flourish. It is our willingness to battle those forces that seek to extinguish the light of civilization burning a a world of darkness that has led to this moment in history where one country, America, embodies the highest ideals of the Western tradition. At this moment we stand at a crossroads where we choose for future generations the continuance of our most sacred traditions or surrender all that we are to criminals, communists, and militant Islamism–all in the name of peace.

But there is no peace in anarchy, class warfare, and theocracy. As Ronald Reagan said in his Rendezvous with Destiny speech, those voices of accommodation don’t speak for the rest of us. To avoid conflict with the Muslim world will you allow a second Holocaust? When the last Jew is dead in the middle east will the Islamists stop there? Or will they turn their eyes to us and our Jews? What then? What accommodations will Ron Paul and his followers be willing to make to avoid war then?

What demands will you accommodate from OWS? Will you allow changes to our election laws to suit their masters’ whims? Will you allow them to seize private property for their new society? Maybe they’ll just want to kill off 1% of us–isn’t that a small price to pay for peace?

Here lies is the path to war. War becomes inevitable if we adopt Paul’s philosophy because it promises the world that the rest of us will abandon our morality, our honor, and our patriotism in return for the illusion of peace. Americans will not sit idle while a second Holocaust plays out no matter what promises a craven government makes to the Islamists. We will not cede our streets to the radicals, the gangs, or the pimps. When the last barrier between the American family and the great night our enemies seek are torn down we will have two choices; fight or be overwhelmed. Americans will fight.

Weakness encourages aggression from our enemies. Ron Paul’s fantasy will lead us on a collision course with those forces who have been waiting for the right moment to seize what they see as their destiny. America is the last stand for Western civilization and now is the time when we must be willing to fight every battle to keep our values and country strong. We cannot accommodate those who wish to destroy us anymore than we can accommodate those that seek to help them in the name of peace.

In a recent column, Mark Steyn expertly summed up the Occupy Wall Street movement this way:

In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due.

So they are in favor of open borders, presumably so that exotic Third World peasants can perform the labor to which they are noticeably averse. Of the 13 items on that “proposed list of demands,” Demand Four calls for “free college education,” and Demand Eleven returns to the theme, demanding debt forgiveness for all existing student loans. I yield to no one in my general antipathy to the racket that is American college education, but it’s difficult to see why this is the fault of the mustache-twirling robber barons who head up Global MegaCorp. Inc. One sympathizes, of course. It can’t be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the “Transgender and Colonialism” class. Americans collectively have north of a trillion dollars in personal college debt. Say what you like about Enron and, er, Solyndra and all those other evil corporations, but they didn’t relieve you of a quarter-mil in exchange for a Master’s in Maya Angelou. So why not try occupying the Dean’s office at Shakedown U?

Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. At Liberty Square, one of the signs reads: “F**k your unpaid internship!” Fair enough. But, to a casual observer of the massed ranks of Big Sloth, it’s not entirely clear what precisely anyone would ever pay them to do.

Which is a good point, not lost I’m sure on the protesters themselves. The fantasy neo-communist society these people all seem to agree on is one  in which their basic needs as well as the accoutrements of the nouveau riche lifestyle they demand be made available to them for free. You and I and those evil corporations need to grow their food, build their machines, and keep them entertained during their massive amounts of free time. In return they will decide how we will be compensated, how we can live our lives, and according to some of the protesters, whether we will be allowed to live at all. If this all sounds suspiciously like the economic model of the Confederate States of America, you have a basic working knowledge of history which already separates you from the so-called 99%.

It is a dangerous illusion for Americans to dismiss this mob and its demands that your freedom be curtailed in the name of “fairness,” which is just a code word for their sense of entitlement. We have witnessed these people defecate on police cars in public and store owners have told horror stories of their bathrooms being destroyed by the protesters. In one instance, some protesters actually defecated on the floor of a restaurant bathroom. Is there a clearer example of their belief they have the right to enslave others than defecating wherever they want and simply expecting others to clean it up? I daresay even slave owners in the South used outhouses.

Steyn goes on to draw a parallel between the Eloi–a shiftless and effeminate race of future humans kept as cattle by industrious, underground dwelling monsters in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine–and the protesters who are demanding a Utopia on earth where they produce nothing all day but have all their needs met by an invisible hand that does all the work out of sight and mind. One wonders how many of these protesters would agree to having a few of their numbers butchered and eaten by we producers in return for our hard work–at least we wouldn’t be making a profit!

The difference between the Eloi and the protesters is that the protesters seek to rule over us all. This protest is the tyranny of the majority that the founding fathers warned about. We can mock the protests, and they are indeed worthy of mockery, but even supposed libertarians like Ron Paul and his personality cult are supporting the “revolution,” one which ends with people having no economic freedom and the working, productive citizens of this country forced to provide for the masses with no hope of profiting from their labor.

These protests are exposing to the world what the Left has always worked for in secret: a collectivist slave state where the mob rules. Too many people are laughing this off, but when these protesters disband they will emerge from their makeshift camps more dedicated than ever to enslaving the rest of us. Tens of thousands of our fellow citizens will spend the rest of their lives attempting to destroy our Republic and replace it with a democratically run slave state. We know this because this is what they’re demanding. I fail to see the humor in any of this.

It was not surprising to find that Paul Krugman’s vile 9/11 blog post was well received by the anti-American, immoral left. For the most part leftists were honest in their support for the idea that America is essentially the villain on the world stage and that even if the victims of the 9/11 attacks didn’t mercilessly deserve their fates, justice for them would involve nothing more than appeasing their murderers. This argument obviously does not go over well with the majority of Americans. Thus we have Tommy Christopher’s novel defense of Krugman which hinges on us accepting one unbelievable proposition:

Krugman writes several stupid, wrong things in that small space, but upon reflection, I think critics left, right, and center ought to cut Krugman some slack. The 9/11 anniversary is a tough day for everyone, and people handle grief in different ways.

In other words, Paul Krugman is actually just so hurt and bereaved by the death of three thousand Americans he’s lashing out in inappropriate ways. But he’s really a good guy.

I’ve heard this same idea a hundred times. As a crime blogger I get comments and emails from the friends and families of some criminal who all say the same thing. So and so didn’t really mean to beat his wife/kill his girlfriend/rape a child – he’s just going through something. The common thread is always that the degenerate in question is misunderstood and people should, as Tommy Christopher puts it in his essay, cut them some slack.

Christopher Hitchens’ greatest accomplishment in life was to put a name to this sort of inanity when he coined the phrase “sinister piffle.”

Paul Krugman is an mean-spirited communist who won a Nobel Prize advocating economic policies designed to take away personal freedom and starve large swathes of the world. Krugman hates America – most communists do. Krugman advocates irresponsibly low interest rates that have done nothing but wipe out the purchasing power of the meager savings Americans have as inflation in food and fuel reaches double digits. This supposed liberal claimed that America would be a socialist country if we weren’t a bunch of racist scumbags.

But his anti-American grievance mongering is in some way out of character? This was just a bad day?

Do we really believe that a man who pines away for America to embrace a philosophy that murdered 50,000,000 people in the 20th century is grieving for 3,000 capitalists? More importantly, must we play this game with people like Tommy Christopher?

I’ve never interacted with Tommy Christopher so I don’t know if he’s a nice guy, but I dislike the pretension. Tommy Christopher is always trotted out by conservatives as the good liberal, and maybe he is. But defending Krugman is basically as good as modern liberalism gets. It’s time for Americans to understand that.

Paul Krugman and the left in general don’t value your life, much less the lives of the dead. In pursuit of their asinine political and economic theories they will be happy to wipe out your life savings. They will rail against any act of patriotism, they will attack any display of faith and will recoil at the virtues that almost all Americans value. Honor, loyalty, faith, honesty – these are not virtues in leftist thought. In the minds of leftists these are pretensions that bitter gun clinging Bible thumpers use to attack their intellectual betters.

That’s the real reason Krugman and many other lefties have these bizarre and disgusting reactions. 9/11 is when we as a nation honor the sacrifices of the heroes who died on that day and renew our commitment to defending American values from militant Islam, nihilistic leftism and all the other forces that seek our destruction. It’s when the country comes together not as a nation of different peoples, but as one people who stand united against evil. Leftism supposes a world where the very people we honor on 9/11 -the cops, the firefighters, the stockbrokers – are evil.

Rather than pretend that Krugman was grieving, it’s time we acknowledge the true ideological divide in this county. It’s never been just about low taxes or gun control or unions; it’s about a small group of misanthropes promoting anti-Americanism caused by their own misanthropy.

Never forget 9/11, but more importantly, never forget that there are forces in the world that celebrated it. Whether it’s the jihadists who plan such attacks, the Palestinians who danced in the streets that day, or the bitter kook who rubs out a screed designed to hurt America’s collective feelings, there are people in this world whose hate drives them to fathomless depths of depravity. We must never condone that by extending our forgiveness.

Four nights of uncontrollable violence in England have stripped away the illusion of safety the English people embraced in exchange for their freedoms. In a country where the people abdicated personal responsibility for government guarantees of security, the right and responsibility of individuals to defend themselves, their families and their property seemed to be a barbarous relic of the past. Now, disarmed and unprepared, English citizens squared off with wave upon wave looters, muggers, rapists and murderers who all realized how empty the guarantees of the welfare state are.

When Sunday Telegraph editor Andrew Gilligan told his own story of victimization during the London riots he touched on the truth of the matter which many are obscuring with politics:

Bleeding a little, I thought I might as well call 999. It was a recorded message. After four and a half minutes, a tired man answered. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “You know what’s going on. We have to give priority to saving people’s lives. I suggest you just go home.”

He was right, of course. I was in Hackney – which, that evening at least, was a law-free zone. That’s the worst thing about riots. Across much of London on Monday night, if someone had decided to break down your door and rape your daughter, there would have been nothing to stop them. There would have been no one to call.

When I was mugged, I was on my way home from a day in Tottenham, listening to the stories of the people who had lost far more and been at far greater risk than me, burned out of their homes at 30 seconds’ notice.

They called 999 too, frantically, desperately, as the riot moved closer. There were 100 police just up the road. The emergency operator could do nothing but listen to their terror.

I finished my journey in a cab. Three or four times, we had to stop and skirt round hooded boys spilling into the road, our windows closed and the door lock on. If they had fancied my taxi, there would have been nothing I or the driver could have done about that, either.

Even on Monday, the victims of Tottenham, black and white, were already tired of outsiders blaming racism, police brutality, or cuts. (What were they rioting about in prosperous, suburban Enfield – rising season-ticket prices?) The real reason for the rioters’ behaviour is much simpler: because they can.

Indeed. The people who claim the riots are merely about race have not watched the videos of white thugs beating and robbing people at random. More importantly they make the same logical fallacy radical feminists make when they claim rape is about being male. Like rape, these riots are driven by power and morality.

The thugs have power – Liberalism has neutered the British and taken away any threats that violent criminals would fear. The police are afraid and ineffective. The people are disarmed and unused to being responsible for their own safety. It is more likely in England that a person defending themselves from an attack will be arrested by authorities than held out publicly as a hero. The English collectively surrendered their personal power to the state in the name of “progress” and naively believed the state would keep order. The joke of liberal England’s idea of law and order keeps papers like The Sun in business.

As bad as things were in England there was still an illusion of state authority – criminals ran from police. But increasingly large groups have found that they could easily challenge the hamstrung and politicized law enforcement agencies. These riots began when the street collectively realized that the police simply couldn’t challenge the power of the mob.

And when the police are overwhelmed the English people are, by design, helpless. How can the British defend their homes and their families from mobs? The only way for law abiding citizens to defend themselves from mob violence is access to weapons. The English allowed that same government to prohibit them from owning weapons for self-defense. The mass victimization of these powerless dependents is inevitable as the overburdened state is exposed as the paper tiger it is.

Add to this mix the rejection of Western values and traditional morality and you have a recipe for long term civil unrest. To be sure, leftist class and race warfare rhetoric has much to do with the violence, but that’s only half the problem. Western Civilization has embraced “multicultural” viewpoints that create ghettoized populations that see no benefit in accepting common morality. Worse, European style multiculturalism actually teaches our children that our traditional values are evil. Little wonder that among those arrested in London was the 19-year-old daughter of a millionaire who was caught in a car with stolen electronics, cigarettes and booze. Her liberal education taught her to throw her lot in with the rioters and wage war against the “rich” including her own family.

We have replaced the virtues of self-reliance, individuality and ambition with selfishness, greed and irrational class envy. We’ve allowed generation after generation to be indoctrinated into a nihilistic ideology that presupposes a universe of subjective morality and in England the authorities disarmed the people who were most likely to be victimized. We do all this because we think it won’t matter to us; that the society can continue to function even as we allow the left to purposefully disenfranchise larger and larger portions.

In four bloody nights the English have had the illusion shattered. Cowed and beaten, the majority of people in London can only hope that the rioters have spent themselves. The Labor dream of a “progressive” society has been shattered by the army of malcontents they created in the hopes of building voting majorities for their sick and poisoned social democracy. The English gave away their power to a government that empowered the worst among them, now they are paying the price for their suicidal idealism. One day the the garbage will froth out of the sewer of England’s welfare state and drown the decayed and decadent remains of a once great empire once and for all. And the English people up to their necks in the unwashed tide of this gluttonous, amoral, savage ocean of sub-humanity will be sucked under one by one until the whole of England is gone.

Are we better off here in America? No. Before the London riots we were plagued by violent “flash mobs” even while the left calls for rioting in support of their petty and farcical agendas. While our cities are assaulted by these mobs our liberal friends have been seeking more restrictions on your right to bear arms and attacking your right to defend yourself. They want you to accept the illusion of safety which has already been shattered like a smoke filled mirror.

You are on you’re own in life. The agents of the state cannot and will not die acting as your bodyguard. The schools have taught your children to crave your blood and the welfare state that sated the most dangerous among us is running out of money. You are not safe and the left has done everything in its power to fill our streets with predators, thugs and radicals who are all one e-vite away from going on a rampage. One tweet, one Facebook posting is all it will take to have you and your family fighting for their lives. Are you prepared for that?

Those who aren’t still believe in the illusion of a safe and civil society. That society hasn’t existed since the New Left gained power and with our economy collapsing around us you are a fool to believe that you are not in peril. Riots like those in London will come here, and in the meantime our cities will the stalking grounds of Internet-organized gangs of youth intent on robbery, rape and murder. Can the police keep you safe from that?

No one cares as much about your personal safety as you, and no one can guarantee your safety but you. It is time to admit we are entering a new dark age where strength is more valuable than your misplaced compassion, misguided charity and ineffective politicking. Buy a gun and learn to use it. Work to ensure that only politicians who respect the 2nd Amendment are elected. Teach your friends and family how to protect themselves and join the neighborhood watch program. In the near future you’ll be glad you did.

A woman in North Carolina by the name of Darlene Enos was arrested when authorities learned that she allowed a man she met on a BDSM dating site to rape her 1-year-old daughter. Authorities only learned of the crime after the rapist, Vincent McDougald, bragged about raping the child to another woman interested in sado-masochism. That person, a damaged stranger with some sort of sexual dysfunction, alerted the police – the family and friends of Darlene Enos never did.

Sometimes when I discuss crime blogging with people who don’t spend much time reading about such things, they talk about how shocking this case or another one is, but this is pretense. Even the most unaware American has heard dozens of stories just like the one above, or worse. We live in a society that sells Charles Manson t-shirts and teaches children that a racist serial killer named Che Guevara was a hero but we’re shocked by violent crime? Cultural conservatives complain bitterly about the sexualization of children in the entertainment industry but they seem shocked by the rampant sexual abuse of those same children. We pretend that the so-called culture wars have no casualties to hide from the painful reality that the Left has largely won those wars and we are now reaping the whirlwind that their class and race war rhetoric has sown.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the plight of children in our country. The traditional Western view of children has always been that they are blessings, gifts from the divine that are both the purpose of life and the mechanism through which we achieve immortality on earth. But for several generations we have been taught that children are obstacles to our happiness, that children are the ending of our lives not the continuation of it. We resent our children, we imagine that they keep us from leading full lives. Starting with the baby boomers every generation envisioned that full life as one of promiscuous sex, rampant drug use and eternal adolescence. In this environment children are at best accessories, objects to be used in our selfish and too often depraved pursuits, extras in our psychodramas that are easily ignored when inconvenient and cast aside when we’re done with them.

It’s little wonder that children are victimized by those who have clearly been taught to treat them as objects and not people.

A woman in Washington named Jasmine Marie Ritchey was arrested after she was found to have thrown her newborn infant in a trashcan. She was actually in a hospital at the time and could have left the child with a worker and been home in time for dinner but decided instead to tie the child’s umbilical cord around his neck and place him under the garbage can liner. He was blue when he was found but was saved by alert hospital staff.

A San Antonio woman named Kristen Lea Bush was arrested after a friend of hers found videos recorded on Bush’s cell phone depicting the woman molesting a young girl. It is believed that she was sending the images to others.

In Ohio, 29-year-old Lenny Love admitted to raping his 6-month-old son. Love is HIV positive and the child has now been infected. Another HIV positive man in Ohio, one Dr. Matthew Eugene Atha, was found to have been raping an 11-year-old girl over a period of two years.

Children just out of the womb being straggled, molested, raped and infected by the miscreants our culture of death creates is the foreseeable conclusion of the leftist driven cultural decline of the West. Even the pro-life movement has embraced the Left’s antipathy toward children. Our most ardent advocates of life accept the idea that giving birth out of wedlock ruins the mother’s life, or that a teen mother who chooses not to abort is dealing with her “mistake.”

Children are not mistakes. They are not burdens or obstacles to our personal fulfillment. When we degrade childbirth and parenting, as imperfect as many situations are, we give license to the degradation of our children by a spoiled, selfish and resentful public. So often children are abused because the people surrounding them have been taught to hate them. We have all been taught that children stop you from living life to the fullest, they anchor you to a meaningless existence. Then we are aghast when that resentment is manifested?

Life is cheap in America, especially for children. It’s cheapened by a society that thinks individualism means selfishness, that adulthood means personal freedom without any moral responsibility and that any encroachment on your penny-ante desires is an affront to the very idea of liberty.

We have a culture so morally backward that people would rather throw their children in the sewer than pick themselves up out of the gutter.

When will we challenge this culture of death with a true culture of life? When will we push back against the misanthropy and decadence? What good is defunding Planned Parenthood in a society where Casey Anthony has fans and groupies that send her gifts? Our food banks are empty, our foster system is full and our neighbors are raping their children. We need to do more than “like” pro-life videos on Facebook to fix this.

We need to embrace the love of life that the Left, and especially the “pro-choice” movement, has been so successful at perverting. It is not our own lives we need to love, but the loves of the weakest among us. We need to convince everyone that children are a gift and that means doing more than saying so in forums or to other pro-life advocates. We need to show people we believe that.

That means going further than you have before. We need to spend as much time helping single and teen mothers as the Left does trying to convince them to abort. We need to make sure our food banks are stocked so that needy children can eat, we need to mentor at-risk youth, we need to show children that we honor and respect them even if their parents don’t. We need to create a culture of life that exists separate from being a reaction to the liberal abortion cult. We need to do these things because abortion is only the first in a long line of horrors the Left has in store for children. Those who manage to be born are being born into a world that rejects the divinity of their existence.

Fighting to change that world is time-consuming and expensive. But it will be worth it unless you think life is cheap.