In previous generations, Americans valued liberty over equality.  Today, we seem to have the opposite with cries of equality everywhere.  A lot of the demands for income equality come from those who have already achieved wealth, most likely because the means to create that equality will not greatly affect them.

Yet wherever you look in the world where people are economically “equal,” you will find that are certainly not free.  This does not include only communist countries, but even those that dabble in socialism or socialism-lite, like much of Europe.  According to the Heritage Freedom Index, 19 of the top 20 countries hold Western values.  Most of the richest countries in the world also lie in the West.  Those that do not have adopted at least Western economic values- some to a greater degree than others.  But as several European countries are discovering, this striving for equality also leads to economic collapse.

Barack Obama once famously stated that our Nation was “founded on the principles of liberty and equality.”  This is utter nonsense.  One cannot find the words “equal” or “equality” in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or even the Federalist Papers.  As historians Will and Ariel Durant stated:

Leave men free and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically…to check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia in 1917.  Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies and when one prevails, the other dies.

This quest for equality at the expense of liberty is one aspect of modern life which helps to undercut Western values.  Another is the concept of having “fun” being a cultural goal.  Gone are the days of now largely-ignored values like duty, honor, patriotism, satisfaction from hard work, religious worship, and living within one’s means.  This is true at the individual and the national levels.

Perhaps the biggest detrimental influence, however, is multiculturalism.  To these adherents, all cultures are to be celebrated and are morally equivalent (there’s that word again).  To assert otherwise brings out the standby racist bogeyman or charges of Eurocentrism.  One of the greatest achievements of Western culture and values was the concept of individual rights.  Today, these values are under attack from the academic elite.  They want to replace personal freedom with government control, and equality before the law with entitlement.  Multiculturalism and even diversity for the sake of diversity is a cancer.

Justin Trudeau in Canada is a huge advocate of “inclusive diversity” which is based on a flawed theory that all cultures and values are equal.  He believes that diversity is the end goal in itself and has his counterparts here in the US, namely people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  How many times have we heard that diversity has made this country great?  Or that “we are a nation of immigrants?”

This naive idea of inclusive diversity has been adopted by our colleges which have simply gone silly and stupid.  Schools of education teach these antithetical values ensuring that future generations adopt them.  Being “taught” today is nothing short of creating a future army of social justice warriors out to look for the multitude of phobias that exist in their communities to the point that schoolchildren are left with the impression that slavery was an American invention contrary to objective historical fact.

Diversity has become a moral end in itself.  Capitalism is taught as the cause of inequalities of every stripe.  Hurt feelings are now the accepted criteria for acceptable speech.  Opposition to their totalitarian views will get one branded as evil, a racist, a fascist, or now, a Trump supporter.

To illustrate how discredited this theory of inclusive diversity is, if the Left truly believed their rhetoric, then they would have allowed Nazis to immigrate to the United States in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  After all, their diverse views which diverged from Western values (fascism is not a Western value) would have made the country stronger, correct?  The fact is that did not happen, nor should it have because Nazism stands in contrast to Western values rooted in individual rights.  Nazis did not allow free speech, nor did they allow free assembly or a free press.  Religions were repressed.  Guns were confiscated and trials were a sham.  In fact, one can say that Nazis violated every one of the first ten amendments to our Constitution which aptly spell out individual rights.  In short, the values of Nazism were not superior to Western values and they were banned.

There is a reason for the Left’s viewpoint and it is nothing short of denialism when confronted with objective fact.  This phenomena has slowly changed into a culture-wide phenomena.  The attack on the US embassy in Benghazi is a perfect example of this denial mentality.  Despite knowledge to the contrary and despite the knowledge these facts would eventually come out, Obama and Clinton spun a story denying the fact it was an organized terrorist attack.  They framed it as a reaction to a little-seen YouTube video produced by an American Coptic Christian.  When confronted with objective fact, they then blame others.  In the case of Benghazi, it was a filmmaker.  In the case of terrorism, the Left blames Israel.  And so on.  Of course, today they have a new bogeyman in Donald Trump who, apparently in 9 months in office, is the cause of every ill facing America not to mention natural disaster.

The sad part is that Americans have become so comfortable with our rights that we no longer recognize their superiority, or the superiority of the values that gave life to those rights.  They assume that an assertion of superiority necessarily leads to an assertion by force.  Thus, a belief a community should show self-sufficiency through hard work, education and determination is labeled racism.  An insistence that immigrants at least learn the common bond of the English language, or that they enter the country legally is labeled xenophobia.  Being careful of those who wish to enter the country from a culture where some wish to destroy our values is labeled Islamophobia.

But, rights are spread through confident example as well as by force.  The fallacy of multiculturalism has shown (and totalitarian regimes have demonstrated) that when no one speaks up, lies become truth and the truth gets lost in the melee.

There is perhaps one area where true conservatives can find some agreement with the so-called alt-right, which this writer contends is not really to the right on the political spectrum.  That area is nation-building.

It is simply a losing proposition to insist that other countries that have absolutely no inkling of democracy can suddenly adopt Western liberal democratic values, principles or governments.  It just does not work as Iraq, Afghanistan and just about every other Muslim country has proven.  The reason is that these populations have been so inculcated into their mindsets that no amount of force, persuasion or example is going to change 1,700 years of religious history.  When a country like Saudi Arabia sits on a UN committee for human rights, one should realize this is a losing battle.

And make no mistake, these cultures have anti-liberal democratic values.  The Left gets around this conundrum in the only way possible: group rights over individual rights.  Hence, the Left adopts the mantra of inclusion, diversity as strength, empathy, denialism, Islamophobia, cultural relativism, “postmodernism,” multiculturalism and, of course, now Trumpohobia.

A good example is Trump’s travel ban from certain countries that happened to be Muslim.  Lost in the knee-jerk reaction was the fact that countries like Yemen or Sudan barely have a functional government, or the US presence is so muted in these countries that they cannot adequately evaluate potential immigrants.  Regardless of the fact that no terrorists have entered the US from these countries (I submit they have from another country on that list- Somalia), does it make sense to take that risk in the name of “Islamophobia?”

Two questions stand out: (1) Do these immigrants truly aspire to live in a country with Western values? and (2) Can we take that risk?

Tomorrow: part 3.