THE IDEA OF e pluribus unum—out of many one—was once the cornerstone of the American social contract. What made this contract work was the commitment to a common American culture based on the freedom and equality of individuals and the commitment of immigrant groups to assimilate and become Americans. Progressives have declared war on this social contract in favor of a society of government-enforced group identities and racial and gender privileges. The politically correct but factually inaccurate term undocumented immigrant is a typical weapon in the war to transform America’s society and culture. It is now employed by universities, the media, and the Democratic Party to describe—and exculpate—people who have entered the country illegally. Those who use it are colluding in the destruction of American sovereignty and citizenship.
The term undocumented makes real-world sense only if someone has gone through a legal process and lost their documents, not if they have never had them, not if they have actually broken the law, violating America’s borders and circumventing an entry process that would normally include screening for communicable diseases, commitment to democratic order, and readiness to defend the nation and contribute to its prosperity. Absent this process, invasion is the accurate term to describe what 11 million illegal aliens have done with the encouragement and support of the Democratic Party. Insistence on the term undocumented as a replacement for “illegal” signifies that America’s laws deserve no respect and that American citizenship as a set of commitments and obligations (and not merely rights and privileges) is meaningless. Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty for those here illegally put the American presidency solidly behind this anti-American agenda, and the Democratic Party to a man is behind him. The erasure of the American republic is the core agenda of the Democratic Party.
Assimilation into America’s culture and allegiance to its constitutional framework were once obligations of immigrants coming to these shores. No longer. As Hudson fellow John Fonte observes, “In the past, American presidents emphasized the life-altering change that occurs when an immigrant renounces prior political loyalties to take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States, leaving one people to join another. By contrast, President Obama, in a promotional video, says becoming an American citizen is ‘not about changing who you are; it’s about adding a new chapter on your journey.’”1 In accordance with this revisionist view, in 2015 Obama watered down the Oath of Allegiance to allow immigrants who were conscientious objectors, or perhaps adherents to the Islamic holy war against the United States, to ignore the pledge “to bear arms on behalf of the United States.”2
Donald Trump was right to emphasize the border crisis and the problem of illegal immigration in his presidential campaign. He was right to declare that “we don’t have a country without a border.”3 By contrast, Clinton promised during the campaign to follow and extend Obama’s immigration policies, including his offer of amnesty, and to create a path to citizenship rights and privileges for millions of people who are in the country illegally. In a private speech to Brazilian bankers in May 2013, Clinton revealed that her “dream” was to have “open borders” for the 600 million inhabitants of the western hemisphere.4 This progressive fantasy discounts the achievements that created America’s unique success and therefore ignores the vast cultural differences that have made resource-rich countries like Mexico poor and resource-poor countries like Japan prosperous. It is America’s unique culture that has made the nation prosperous and great, and it is on this culture that progressives have declared war. The dream of open borders captures the contempt with which progressives regard America’s sovereignty and the hard-won achievements of its people. Democratic immigration policy undermines the values that made these achievements possible and is an attempt to redefine what it actually means to be an American.
The lynchpin of this redefinition is the replacement of assimilation as a goal with integration—a concept designed to emphasize the preservation of the cultural and linguistic differences of immigrants’ origins. “Integration” is the politically correct way of emphasizing, in Obama’s words, that immigration is “not about changing who you are; it’s about adding a new chapter on your journey.” The emphasis on the diversity of identities and cultures is structured to fit the left’s oppression paradigm. In the words of John Fonte, “The new, transformed civic morality of the progressive narrative . . . divides Americans between dominant or ‘oppressor’ groups—whites, males, native-born, Christians, heterosexuals—and victim or ‘oppressed’ groups—racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities; women; LGBT individuals, and ‘undocumented’ immigrants. Progressive politics doesn’t seek the national interest or the common good. Its purpose is to promote ‘marginalized’ or ‘oppressed’ groups against ‘dominant’ or ‘oppressor’ groups.”5 It is the old Marxist wine in new bottles, and the results are bound to be similar.
Progressives have devised a politically correct term—people of color—to enforce their oppression worldview. “People of color” is not even grammatical English but a French construction. Its purpose is to create a vast new alleged victim group and further isolate the white European American majority as an oppressor of everyone else. The effect of employing the term people of color is to erase the distinction, for example, between the descendants of Spanish conquistadors who ravaged the indigenous Indians of Mexico and the Indians they conquered and killed. They are both now “people of color” and therefore oppressed, deserving of special sympathy and privilege as a matter of “social justice.” Virtually all the immigrants and refugees for whom the Democrats seek amnesty and asylum belong to the ideological category “people of color” and are therefore viewed by progressives as minorities and victims—and potential recruits for the Democratic Party.
A particularly aggressive instance of the left’s anti-American agenda, related to immigration, is the establishment of “Sanctuary Cities,” which are supported by the entire Democratic Party. Sanctuary Cities are so described because their officials are pledged to defy immigration law and offer a safe haven to people who have entered the United States illegally, including serial felons who have already wreaked havoc on hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans. Sanctuary Cities were created by leftists immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11 as an explicit effort to counter the attempts of the newly created Department of Homeland Security to protect Americans from further assaults. Sanctuary Cities have been established in 340 Democrat-controlled municipalities across the United States through resolutions that pledge noncooperation with the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration officers.
Behind the movement to create Sanctuary Cities were two radical organizations—the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Both organizations opposed the Patriot Act and the war in Afghanistan to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. Both provided political and legal support to domestic enemies like Sami al-Arian, a leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad eventually deported for his terrorist activities, and for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan.6 The resolutions—really acts of sedition—were passed by their Democratic allies, turning them into Sanctuary Cities:
Therefore, be it resolved that the council of the city of ______ . . .
Directs the Police Department of the City of _________ to:
A crucial element of this effort to obstruct America’s war on Islamic terrorists was point c, the injunction against obtaining information about the religious views or associations of individuals until after they had actually committed a crime, which in the case of Islamic radicals could mean scores or thousands of victims. America is the target of a religious war. Consequently, such a ban places serious obstacles in the way of officials attempting to assess threats and prevent them before they happen. The Boston Marathon bombers, the San Bernardino and Orlando killers—all Islamic jihadists—were on the FBI’s radar before their attacks but slipped off because of the prohibitions against taking their religious commitments and associations into account.
This denial about the nature of America’s enemy is pervasive among America’s intelligence services and first-responder offices thanks to the determined efforts by the Democratic Party, particularly since Obama’s election in 2008. Before this political correctness set in, the 9/11 Commission Report on the Islamic attacks of September 2001 referred to “Islam” 322 times, used the word “Muslim” 145 times, and used “jihad” (holy war) 126 times. But according to Republican congressman Louie Gohmert, “The current FBI counterterrorism lexicon, which describes the language [agents] can use, does not include ‘jihad,’ and does not include ‘Muslim,’ does not include ‘Islam.’ It includes ‘violent extremism’ many times, but it does not include ‘sharia’ [the Islamic law jihadists are seeking to impose globally]. It does not even include ‘Al-Qaeda,’ ‘Hezbollah,’ or ‘Hamas.’ Even the National Intelligence Strategy 2009 does not include references to ‘jihad,’ ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Islam,’” while the Obama administration officially describes the war Islamic radicals have declared on the United States as “overseas contingency operations.”8
The Democratic Party has never been comfortable with the war against radical Islam or willing to acknowledge its religious nature. After the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 when six Americans were killed and a thousand injured, President Bill Clinton did not even visit the site and attempted to treat it as an isolated attack by individual criminals. This denial persisted through several major terrorist attacks on US assets and despite Osama bin Laden’s 1996 “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.”9 It made Democrats reluctant partners in the war in Iraq, early opponents of the Guantanamo holding facility and military tribunals, and proponents of prosecuting the mastermind of 9/11 and other Islamic terrorists in civilian courts.
This discomfort flows from the progressive view that Islam is a religion of “people of color” and therefore oppressed. Consequently, Muslims require special protections and allowances that might seem imprudent from a security point of view. Surveys by Al-Jazeera and other groups show that hundreds of millions of Muslims hold radical beliefs, including support for the holy war against “infidels.”10 Democrats oppose the surveillance of mosques, which are mainly financed by Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic state, and are centers of recruitment to jihadist agendas. Democrats were appalled when Donald Trump proposed a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration until proper vetting procedures were instituted. Trump’s concern with the vetting problems for a religious group whose beliefs were at odds with the American Constitution and millions of whose members supported a holy war against the United States was denounced as bigotry by progressives.
While hundreds of millions of individual Muslims are law-abiding and peaceful, Islam itself—far from being a religion of the oppressed—is a religion of domination and submission. The Arabic word Islam means “submission,” and the Koran clearly enjoins its followers to treat other religions as requiring just that. Theocratic Islam is not only a religion but also a political ideology recognizing no separation between mosque and state. Submission to its religious law—sharia—is thus to be enforced by the state. Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam is a supremacist religion that regards non-Muslims as infidels who must be eliminated or subdued. In words that are holy writ today, its Prophet incites believers to behead unbelievers and pursue a war of terror against them: “I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”11 To regard ISIS and al-Qaeda as a perversion of the religion rather than a radical interpretation of its texts—as Democrats do—is denial and is dangerous.
The effects of these beliefs are etched in Islam’s 1,400-year history of bloody conquest, including a modern genocide in Armenia and contemporary genocides against Christians and Yazidis in Syria and Iraq. Sponsors of Islamic terrorism like the Muslim Brotherhood and powerful Islamic states, most notably Iran, are promoting a genocidal war against the Jews and openly seek to establish a global caliphate—a world state under Islamic law—that would abrogate all the constitutions that guarantee basic freedoms and individual rights.
Democrats’ discomfort with the war against radical Islam—with even calling it a “war against radical Islam”—is also consistent with their discomfort with almost any war that America has found itself in over the last half century. This is attributable to progressives’ politically correct prism, through which they see America as a predominantly white, capitalist superpower and therefore in the category of oppressive states. Consequently, progressives regard America generally as a source of international problems rather than of potential solutions. These attitudes have led Democrats to promote a downgrading of American military power and influence, which has emboldened America’s adversaries, Russia and China, and resulted in an expansion of their influence in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Democratic policies of appeasement and retreat have led to three disastrous Democratic policy decisions in the war with radical Islam. The first was the bloodless surrendering of Iraq to ISIS and Iran. As commander-in-chief, Obama rejected the counsel of his Joint Chiefs of Staff following America’s victory in the Iraq War and made no effort to retain America’s giant military base in Iraq’s “Green Zone” or to keep a recommended force of up to 20,000 US troops in the country. Such a military presence would have smothered the ISIS terror network in its cradle. Instead, the vacuum created by America’s withdrawal led rapidly to the emergence of ISIS as the largest terror organization in history, with tentacles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, North Africa, and other countries around the world. It also led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Christians, Yazidis, and other “infidels” and chaos throughout the Fertile Crescent that created 20 million refugees across the region while Obama was in office.
Second, Obama’s Middle Eastern retreat was crystallized by his failure to enforce the “red line” he had drawn in Syria to prevent its dictator from using chemical weapons. This capitulation allowed Russia to move into the region, replacing America as its dominant external power. Third, at the same time, Obama directed harsh diplomatic moves against Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, another American ally. In the midst of public demonstrations against the Egyptian regime, he declared that Mubarak must step down, effectively driving Mubarak out of power while giving political support to the Muslim Brotherhood to replace him.12 This reprised Jimmy Carter’s attack on the Shah of Iran, an American ally, which led directly to the creation of the first Islamic terrorist state. The fall of Mubarak paved the way for the ascension of the previously outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that had nurtured Osama bin Laden and provided the ideological foundations for the Islamic holy war. When the Egyptian military toppled the Brotherhood, the White House cut off military aid to the new regime, driving the largest Arab nation into the arms of the Russians.
The Democrats’ appeasement of America’s enemies and betrayal of America’s allies achieved an apotheosis in a nuclear deal with Iran, a nation that has been at war with America and the West since 1979. Iran is the chief sponsor of international terror and directly responsible for thousands of American deaths, beginning with the massacre of 241 US marines in Lebanon in 1983 and including thousands of Americans maimed or killed by Iranian IEDs in Iraq. Iran’s fanatical leaders were regarded as so dangerous that an international sanctions regime was put in place to weaken Iran and prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. Obama made it a centerpiece of his policy to lift those sanctions and bring an unrepentant and unrehabilitated Iran back into the community of nations.
In 2009, the Iranian people poured into the streets of Teheran in a “Green Revolution” to protest the tyranny of its ruling mullahs and possibly overthrow them. Throughout the demonstrations and the repression and murders of protesters that followed, the Obama administration and its secretary of state were silent, a distinct contrast to their attitude toward the demonstrators in Egypt who—with Obama’s encouragement—overthrew an American ally. Washington’s silence was a product of the administration’s already formed plans to lift the sanctions on Iran, bring the pariah state back into the community of nations, provide it with a path to nuclear weapons, and line its pockets with nearly $200 billion in sweeteners for the deal. When the agreement was concluded, Iran emerged from its status as a pariah nation to become the principal power in the Middle East.
The Iran deal provided that Teheran would essentially police itself in the matter of inspections and whether it adhered to the requirements. During the negotiations, America’s diplomatic team also turned a blind eye to Iran’s development of ballistic missiles, previously banned by the United Nations, and its aggressive moves in Yemen and other areas of the Middle East.
This was, first of all, a betrayal of America’s Middle Eastern ally, Israel, at a time when Iranian leaders were openly predicting that tiny nation would be wiped off the map within 25 years. But it was also a betrayal of America, empowering her mortal enemy, allied now with her Russian and Chinese adversaries. To flaunt their contempt for the American president and his globally recognized weakness, the regime’s supreme leader led thousands of Iranians in chants of “Death to America” while the negotiations were still in progress. This insult and threat were also met with silence by Obama and his new secretary of state, John Kerry, whose daughter had married into the Iranian hierarchy.
Because the American public was opposed to the Iran deal by a gaping margin of 28 percent, Obama did not present the agreement to Congress for approval as a treaty. This would have required ratification by two-thirds of the US Senate. Instead, he framed it as an “executive agreement,” which would not. Before taking the deal to Congress for approval, he brought it to the UN for ratification, one of several efforts by his administration to erode American sovereignty in favor of a global authority.13
And it was a particularly unsavory one. The UN is dominated by a bloc of 57 Islamic states and a collection of dictatorships and kleptocracies notorious for passing resolutions to advance the agendas of terrorist organizations like the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah, and Hamas. According to NGO “UN Watch,” in the 10 years since it was set up, the UN Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel for alleged violations than the rest of the world combined.14 This is hardly surprising, since the UN Human Rights Council has been composed of such notorious human rights violators and Jew-hating regimes as Gaddafi’s Libya, Communist Cuba, and Iran itself. Yet the UN is a go-to world body for Democratic Party progressives, egged on by their one-world delusions.
The Democrats’ globalism is not incidental to their agendas but central. It is behind policies ranging from the Obama administration’s decision to turn control of Internet domain names to an international bureaucracy that would allow dictatorial regimes to censor their content to the push for porous and eventually open borders.15 Democratic justices on the Supreme Court, whose responsibility it is to enforce the US Constitution, regularly defer to international legal authorities, most notoriously Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, when asked for her advice on drawing up a new constitution for Egypt, said, “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, have an independent judiciary. It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done.”16
It was a revealing choice. The South African Constitution reflects the communist outlook of the leaders of the African National Congress who wrote it and provides as much protection for South Africans as the notorious Stalin constitution did for the benighted citizenry of Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Like its Soviet counterpart, the South African Constitution is made up of “paper rights,” as James Madison would have dismissed them. These are rights that either cannot be enforced or can easily be withdrawn. For example, the South African Constitution includes “the right to be protected against violence.” Despite this guarantee, South Africa has a murder rate seven times that of the United States and is the rape capital of the world. The South African Constitution also provides citizens with the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of race or sex—unless the government decides such discrimination is fair. Lest anyone think this is an exaggeration, here is the text itself: “Discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair.”17
The South African Constitution is a bill of entitlements—promises by government that government can renege on. This is the very opposite of the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. The rights guaranteed by the US Constitution are not entitlements but limits to governmental power. It is these limits that guarantee individual liberty.
Why do Democrats denigrate the Constitution almost instinctively and regularly circumvent its provisions? Why, for example, has Obama disregarded the Constitution’s separation of powers and issued executive orders that usurp the legislative powers of Congress over immigration policy and American sovereignty? Why do Democratic Supreme Court justices invent nonexistent constitutional rights, as in Roe v. Wade, to usurp the power of state legislatures to determine policy on abortion? Why do Democratic Supreme Court justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg openly express their contempt for the Constitution as old and outdated? Why do they want to regard its text as mere prologue and displace it with a “living constitution,” which can be changed to accommodate “modern” opinions? Why do they make these changes through the bad faith of unelected justices and not through the amendment process that the Constitution provides?
The answer lies in their impatience to fundamentally transform America to conform to their progressive vision and their conviction that the Constitution’s system of checks and balances is a giant obstacle in their way. And they are right about that. As Madison explained in Federalist #10, the checks and balances of the Constitution were designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority and to “thwart” radical schemes to redistribute income, which he described as “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.”18 Understanding that the chief architect of the Constitution regarded progressive agendas like redistribution as “wicked” and that the Constitution was designed to frustrate their designs helps focus progressives on the fact that the Constitution is a barrier to the future they desire. This, in turn, explains why they are so determined to find ways to circumvent or alter it through the power of the justices to invent new rights, as in Roe v. Wade, and to reinterpret the document itself as a “living constitution” that exists to accommodate their political and social prejudices.
In the third presidential debate, Hillary Clinton was asked about her attitude toward the Constitution and specifically according to what principles she thought it should be interpreted. Her answer was not an answer to the actual question but was revealing nonetheless: “The Supreme Court should represent all of us. That’s how I see the Court. And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on our behalf of our rights as Americans.”19 In other words, Clinton, like other proponents of a “living Constitution,” sees the court not as a guardian of the principles on which the nation was founded and not as a document designed to limit governmental power. Instead, she sees it as a political instrument for carrying out the will of a political majority—exactly what the framers were determined to prevent.
Regarding the Supreme Court as an institution that should represent the will of the people, let alone that it should be a weapon in a class war against the successful and powerful, is not a constitutional view of its function. It is the opposite. It is an anticonstitutional view that, if it were to prevail, would destroy the framework the founders created and that has served the nation so well. In the constitutional scheme, it is the House of Representatives that is the governmental body designed to represent the people, which is why its members are elected every two years, while Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. It is a very dangerous view that holds that the Supreme Court should represent the people against those whom Clinton regards as powerful (apparently not herself). Such a court could hardly enforce the fundamental principle of American democracy that everyone is equal before the law.
The one specific Supreme Court decision mentioned by Clinton in the presidential debates, along with her determination to see it reversed, was Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In that case, a 5–4 majority pitting court conservatives against court liberals held that the government could not prevent independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation. To do so would be an unacceptable limit on free speech. “If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”20
During her campaign, Clinton vowed to introduce a constitutional amendment within her first 30 days in office to overturn the Citizens United decision. In a statement, one of her spokesman explained: “The amendment would allow Americans to establish common sense rules to protect against the undue influence of billionaires and special interests and to restore the role of average voters in elections.”21 The spokesman did not explain why Hillary’s huge fees to give closed speeches at Wall Street firms and make private commitments to banks like Goldman Sachs would not represent an undue influence of billionaires and special interests, whereas forming voluntary associations to openly express political opinions would.
Opposition to Citizens United is but one front in a general war Democrats are conducting on free speech and the First Amendment.22 This war includes the violent attacks on Trump campaign events during the 2016 election, directed from the DNC and the Obama White House. It includes the drive of universities—a political base of the Democratic Party—to purge Republicans and conservatives from their faculties. A recent study headed by sociologist Daniel Klein recently found that in 1,500 American universities, the ratio of Democrat-voting members to Republican-voting members in history departments was 33.5–1. In journalism and communications departments, the ratio was 20–1.23 The war against the First Amendment also includes universities’ drives to ban “hate speech”—a vague term that more often than not includes conservative dissent from progressive orthodoxies—and to make their campuses “safe places” for left-wing ideas.
As part of her presidential campaign, Clinton proposed a $500 million investment in “antibullying” programs for schools. She immediately tied her proposal to her opponent’s political rhetoric in a campaign ad, in which she said, “I don’t want bullies in my life, and I especially don’t one in the White House.”24 But bullying speech is in the eye of the beholder and is constitutionally protected precisely because the unscrupulous can misrepresent words they disagree with as words that offend them. The political left has already developed an elaborate theory of “microaggressions” to label perceived verbal disrespect for so-called marginal or oppressed groups as being beyond the pale. According to Wikipedia’s page on microaggressions, they have “also been defined as ‘rooted in racism, sexism, or discrimination based on nationality or sexual orientation. [They] can be delivered casually or even unconsciously.’”25 Unconsciously! In other words, it is a category invented by the politically correct to stigmatize those who are not.
How far can this assault on speech be taken? In June 2015, Obama’s former Department of Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, now president of the University of California, issued an order to her faculty warning them not to utter the following statements that she deemed unacceptable microaggressions: “America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” “Everyone can succeed in this country, if they work hard enough,” and “When I look at you, I don’t see color.”26
Obviously this is not just an assault on free speech. It is an assault on America and on everyone consigned to an “oppressor” group, particularly if they do not have negative feelings toward “people of color.” Otherwise, why proscribe the statement “When I look at you, I don’t see color”? The same penchant for suppressing politically incorrect ideas was manifest in Clinton’s support for a UN resolution designed by the Islamic bloc to criminalize critics of Islam as “Islamophobic.”27 The term Islamophobia was originally coined by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence critics of Islamic terrorism and misogyny. Alleged “Islamophobia” is also an important concern of such key Democratic institutions as the Center for American Progress, a 501c3 financed by the Clintons and George Soros. Until he was hired as Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, the center was run by John Podesta. Under Podesta’s leadership, it published a $100,000 “report” called Fear, Inc., which stigmatized every major critic of Islamic terrorism and misogyny as an Islamophobe.28
With the proper government enforcement, this is how a totalitarian future looks. Ideas that challenge the reigning orthodoxy are identified as beyond the pale and therefore illegitimate, a form of “hate speech” that needs to be suppressed. It is a logical extension of the progressive view in which political opponents are deposited—and discarded—into a basket of deplorables: racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and xenophobes.