15 Facts and Arguments in the Hiroshima Debate Which Are Ignored by the MSM and Historians Alike

A critical examination of some common charges against the Americans regarding the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Racism

Americans may have felt hatred for the Japanese during WWII, but it was not for what race the Japanese belonged to and it was certainly not a hatred that allowed them to murder on sight (what did the so-called American racists hate, and fight, the Nazis for, then ; for being blond, blue-eyed Aryans?!). It was for what they had done, the treachery in Hawaii (remember Pearl Harbor?), the murders of POWs on the Bataan death march, and the numerous other atrocities committed throughout the Pacific, of which the rape of Nanking is only the most repellent. Still, that anger alone was not what led U.S. authorities to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the Japanese refusal to surrender, backed by the prospect that the blood-letting would continue and that the fighting would, in fact, intensify.

The Americans' Uncalled-for
Intensification of the War

Many more Japanese died in the hell-hole of Okinawa than in the nuclear blast of Hiroshima. More were killed in the battle of Leyte Gulf than in the explosion at Nagasaki. Based on America's 35% casualties on Okinawa, if 767,000 Americans were to attack Kyushu, one prediction said the dead and wounded would number 268,000, as many as the number of battle deaths that the U.S. had experienced in the war so far. As for Japanese battle death figures, they inevitably dwarfed those of the U.S. (On average, the ratio of combat fatalities was 4:1; on Iwo Jima, three Japanese died for every American; on Okinawa, that figure was 15:1; at Leyte Gulf, 20:1; on Attu, in the Aleutians, 50:1.) Japanese casualties on the battlefield by summer 1945 numbered 1.2 million total.

Nobody suggests that the Japanese be grateful for being the target of at atomic bombs — but, bearing those figures in mind, who can doubt that far more lives — as millions of soldiers and civilians rushed to the defence of their homeland — would have been lost in conventional warfare than actually were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

War on Civilians

Those who criticize the Americans for waging war, nuclear or otherwise, on civilians forget that the Japanese armed forces were arming every person available in Japan, from women and children to the elderly, and with everything from advanced firearms to primitive pointed bamboo sticks, to fight the Yankee invaders to the death.

Incidentally, this was not as fanatical as it may sound at first, given their own behavior on enemy soil. The Empire of the Sun expected American soldiers to submit the Japanese people to the same atrocities — in fact, it expected the "foreign devils" to treat them worse — that its soldiers had hoisted upon foreign civilians such as those at Nanking or Manila. Japan's coming victims might as well avoid dishonour and at the same time contribute to holding back the U.S. onslaught by, if possible, taking a few enemy soldiers with them to their death. Fight to the last had been the Japanese motto throughout the war.

Thus, the war promised to become even more bloody, as it indeed already had.

Still, the atomic targets were not chosen out of the blue. "[O]ne of the most important military-command and communications centers in Japan [that] would have become the Imperial headquarters had the islands been invaded and Tokyo been captured" (The New Yorker's John Hersey), the Honshu island city was (correctly) referred to as an "important naval base" by Le Monde back in August 1945, although it is typical that in a retrospective 60 years later (scroll to bottom), the independent daily omitted all types of strategic information and all types of context, for expressions such as "martyrdom", "crimes against humanity", "a haughty indifference of the laws created by men to check barbarism", and "a graduation as useless as indecent into horror". (Needless to say, Japanese actions at Nanking and the Bataan Death March did not figure into this kind of rants.)

Peace Feelers Ignored

It has become common for some to say that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace, and that the treacherous and demagogic Americans (or their leaders, if you want to be cute) ignored the peace feelers. There's so much to say to this charge one hardly knows where to begin. First of all, we are told the peace feelers were secret. If it was so obvious as we are told that the Japanese (or, at least, their government) as a whole were desirous to establish an era of peace and goodwill (unlike the murderous Yankees), why didn't they simply make the call for peace public (and thereby stigmatize the leaders in Washington, had the latter refused to take them up on it)? If asked the question, we will be told that it wasn't that easy and that Japanese pride was involved.

Well… exactly! If pride is involved, to what extent can you be sure the peace offer — or any message — is sincere, and especially, how much power does the individual (or the band of individuals) have in proffering it if he or they are surrounded by sizable parties of prideful leaders, soldiers, and other individuals?

As it happens, if and when you get a message (be it a peace proposal or anything else) from a mortal enemy — or even from a traditional friend (think Chirac and Villepin at the UN in early 2003), how are you to know they are sincere? Is disinformation of some kind involved? How do you know they're not stalling for time? Time for what? To prepare their fellow leaders, and the population, for surrender? (In that case, how do you know what the chances are they will be successful in the task?) Or to build more weaponry, arm more combatants, launch more attacks, and/or kill more of your own nationals?

And who would the peace feeler have been from? From the entire government (in which case they could have made it public, supposedly)? From a clique in the government? And if, so, how much power did its members actually have — and were the latter sincere, were they wishful thinkers, or might they the victims of manipulation (from those who wanted to stall for time for military reasons)?

To use a surreal example of a peace feeler (from the same conflict), in May 1941 Rudolf Hess asked for peace between Britain and Germany (after flying a Messerschmitt solo to Scotland), only to be immediately disowned by Adolf Hitler. For months — years, really — British citizens, commoners and responsible leaders alike (not to mention nervous foreigners, and their governments), wondered what secret intentions, if any, might have laid behind the feat.

Also, to what extent should we go in trusting today's Japanese accounts of their willing and innocent peace-seeking forebears?

In any case, here are some things to ponder: it is well-known that the Imperial Army was full of officers and men of the type as those who, when they learned that Japan would eventually surrender, tried to prevent Hirohito's message to that effect from being broadcast. It is also known (not least to the Navy personnel at the time!) that while the Japanese were supposedly desiring peace, kamikaze pilots were crashing their Zeros into U.S. Navy warships. What is less known is that over 400 people were arrested in Japan in 1945 on the mere suspicion of favoring negotiation.

In conclusion: the Americans were aware of the propensity of the Japanese to fight to the very end, and untold thousands had bled, suffered, and died in so learning. And for very good reasons, Americans were not very trustful of the Japanese; indeed, the formers' tendency to regard the latter as duplicitous cannot be ascribed only to racism, far from it (remember Pearl Harbor?).

Related:
• Hiroshima 15: Examining the Issues Surrounding the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Japan (Erik Svane)

• Hiroshima 14: "I regard Hiroshima revisionism as the greatest hoax in American history" (Robert Maddox)

• Hiroshima 13: Although It Is Not Said Openly, Hiroshima Also Played a Purifying Role, IE the Baptism of a New Japan, the Event that Put an End to 50 Years of Crimes (Le Monde)

• Hiroshima 12: Political Correctness in Japan: The comment "tramples on the feelings of victims", so… Shut the F**k Up and Lose Your Job! (re the forced resignation of Japan's defense (!) minister)

• Hiroshima 11: If Western elites cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all; most never learned the narrative of WWII, only what was wrong about it (Victor Davis Hanson)

• Hiroshima 10: If Not for the Atom Bombs, Japan, as we know it today, would not exist (S L Sanger, author of “Working on the Bomb”)

• Hiroshima 9: Over one million warning leaflets were dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities 5 days before the Hiroshima bombing (Bill Whittle)

• Hiroshima 8: Was It Wrong to Use the Atom Bomb on Japan? (Father Wilson Miscamble)

• Hiroshima 7: Some Facts About Hiroshima and World War II That You Hear Neither From America's MSM, University Élites, and History Books, Nor From Japan's (New York Times)

• Hiroshima 6: "Lance or spear practice was a regular women's exercise to practice for the anticipated U.S. landing" (a Japanese American)

• Hiroshima 5: Japan's plans for defense involved mobilizing the civilian population, including women and children, for the customary suicidal battle tactics (Thomas Sowell)

• Hiroshima 4: "Les 300 000 morts d'Hiroshima ont épargné bien davantage de Japonais, qui auraient été écrasés sous des bombes ordinaires" (Charles de Gaulle)

• Hiroshima 3: A mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths—and that's not counting civilians (Wall Street Journal)

• Hiroshima 2: Hand-wringing over Hiroshima is just virtue-signaling by people who never said a bad word about Stalin or Mao’s mass murders (Glenn Reynolds)

• Hiroshima 1: Unlike the ends of the majority of conflicts, World War II in the Pacific grew increasingly bloody as U.S. forces approached the Japanese homeland (Erik Svane)

Why Leftists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg LOVE the South African Constitution

President Trump [has] nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a DC Circuit judge, to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Anthony Kennedy

writes Benny Huang (update: much obliged — obrigado — Sarah, for the Instalink).

“My judicial philosophy is straight forward,” said Kavanaugh at the press conference announcing his nomination.

“A judge must be independent and interpret the law, not make the law. A judge must interpret the constitution as written.”

In a perfect world Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy would be the default for all judges but in the flawed world we live in that is just not the case. More than a few believe that their job is to be arbiters of justice, to correct the voters when they are in error, or simply to do what is right.

On its face, none of these guiding principles sounds awful. Is it wrong to dispense justice? Well yes, it is, when “justice” is merely a gussied-up political agenda. Is it wrong to correct the voters when they have erred? No, not when their elected representatives are violating the Constitution. That’s called judicial review and it’s right and proper.

On the other hand, a judge who strikes down a law simply because he finds it wrongheaded, ineffective, or immoral and then scrounges for a post facto rationalization has committed an egregious offense against the republican form of government. That’s called judicial activism. Is it wrong for a judge to simply do what’s right? Yes, because it’s not his place to decide what’s right. That’s our job.

A judge should never ask if a law before him is prudent or righteous. He should ask how it squares with the text of the Constitution, which ought to be, with the exception of rare statutory cases, his only guiding light. Everything else is bias.

Related — The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell:
A World of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

While not all judges seem to revere our founding document, a few appear not even to like it. For example, the recently retired Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner wrote an op-ed while still on the bench in 2016 in which he explained in no uncertain terms that the Constitution is basically worthless.

He opined:

“I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation … Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc., of the 21st century. Which means that the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14th), do not speak to today.”

Posner’s antipathy for the Constitution hasn’t stopped him from decreeing all sorts of laws to be, ahem, unconstitutional. In 1999, he wrote a legal opinion (fortunately the minority opinion) in which argued that a Wisconsin law against partial birth abortion violated the Constitution. The law withstood legal challenge but not for lack of trying on Posner’s part.

Of course, it didn’t violate the Constitution. There’s no right to abortion in the Constitution much less a right to the most gruesome last-minute variety. And yet Posner asserted that the duly enacted law violated that old, useless piece of parchment that he finds irrelevant because he couldn’t keep his personal agenda out of his decision.

Another example of contempt for the Constitution can be found on a higher court, the US Supreme Court. In 2012, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps the most radical leftist ever to ascend to SCOTUS, explained to an Egyptian audience that they ought not use the US Constitution as a model for their new, post-Arab Spring government. She suggested using the South African Constitution instead.

This is alarming, to say the least.

The current South African constitution become law in 1997 after the end of Apartheid and the rise of the African National Congress, a Moscow-backed crypto-Communist political party that was once the political arm of the terrorist organization Umkhonto we Sizwe.

If American leftists were to write a replacement constitution for our country today it would probably look a lot like South Africa’s. The South African constitution comes with many positive rights including the right to health care. South African healthcare sucks, by the way, but at least everyone has a right to it. The document contains a free speech clause but also a “hate speech” exception that renders it essentially void. Rather than robust free exercise of religion protections it offers a very weak “freedom of conscience” clause. Citizens may believe what they wish, something that no government can take away though many have tried, but citizens must still speak and act as the government commands.

One of the more hideous aspects of South Africa’s constitution is its supposed protection against discrimination, which actually offers no protection at all. I would be fine with this provision if the only discrimination it addressed were the private sector variety but that is not the case. Their constitution prohibits only “unfair” discrimination which is code for discrimination against blacks, leaving plenty of room for supposedly “fair” discrimination against whites.

How do they get away with this? There’s a nice loophole in the constitution:

“Discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair.”

So the state can’t discriminate unless the state decides that it can. The black-majority South African government takes full advantage of this power to discriminate against its white citizens under the policy known as “black economic empowerment.”

This is the document that Justice Ginsburg believes young governments should pattern themselves after. Terrifying.

Evidence exists that Justice Ginsburg does more than merely admire the South African constitution from afar, she seeks to imitate it.

For example, our Constitution does not contain the same allowance for “fair” racial discrimination enshrined in South Africa’s constitution but that hasn’t stopped Ginsburg from ruling repeatedly that it does. In cases such as Fisher v. Texas and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Ginsburg has sided with discriminatory policies that hurt whites and Asians.

She doesn’t seem to like free exercise of religion either. Ginsburg has brushed off this fundamental American precept in such cases as Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Clearly, she prefers the pale facsimile known as “freedom of conscience” because of its general meaninglessness.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been using her gavel for more than twenty years to hammer our Constitution into something that closely resembles its South African counterpart. No American voted for her stealthy transformation of our founding document but she’s giving it to us anyway, one landmark decision at a time.

Another judge who can’t keep his personal agenda to himself is the thankfully retired John Paul Stevens. This Supreme Court justice wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post entitled “The Five Extra Words That Can Fix the Second Amendment”—which came as a surprise to those of us who didn’t know it was broken.

Stevens argued that the second amendment has been grossly misinterpreted in recent years and suggests gutting the amendment by making a small addition that would nullify the whole thing. Stevens’ new and “improved” second amendment reads as follows:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

Note the italicized text. Since no one is actually serving in the militia in 2018 this amendment would not prevent the government from seizing every [pea]-shooter in the country. But at least we could still keep our second amendment as some kind of memento. It would be worthless but at least the gun grabbers could pretend that they didn’t trample on anyone’s constitutional rights.

It should not be overlooked that Stevens stood opposite the pro-second amendment majority on the two most important gun rights cases of the recent era: Heller v. DC and McDonald v. Chicago. In other words, Stevens handed down opinions that reflected the Constitution as Stevens wished it to be, not as it was written.

That’s judicial malpractice. The second amendment was approved by a constitutional convention and ratified by three quarters of the state legislatures. Stevens’s policy wishes were approved by no one except Stevens and they don’t (or shouldn’t) amount to a hill of beans.

Not surprisingly, Stevens wrote an op-ed in the wake of Parkland mass shooting that argued for the repeal of the second amendment. It’s almost as if Stevens had tried for years to erase it by court decision. Stevens didn’t like that amendment and his rulings reflected that prejudice.

These aforementioned judges proved themselves not disciplined enough to resist the lure of power once on the bench. The law is what they say it is, or at least that’s what they believe. Our country can’t afford any more of these judges.

Traitors and Russian Lackeys in the White House? Also, Are They Trump's Intelligence Agencies or Are They Obama and Clinton's FBI and CIA?

Regarding the alleged treason summit:

    It's dismaying to read about traitors and Russian lackeys in the White House and in the Western hemisphere.  Indeed, who can deny that we have had an Oval Office occupant who whispered to the Russian president that he would have "more flexibility" after the next election? a secretary of state who worked for a "Russian reset" while being involved in an attempt to sell 20% of America's uranium reserves to Moscow? and a European leader who decided to pay billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia for natural gas imports, all the while nuking her country's nuclear power industry?  (Like numerous pacifists during the Cold War, today's greens and environmentalists have turned out to be, consciously or otherwise, doing the Kremlin's bidding…)

    Oh silly me!  I forgot: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and Angela Merkel are Democrats, Democrat-friendly, and/or statists who lean to the left, and so of course, those facts must be dismissed as mere Republican talking points — there is nothing to investigate, no, nothing at all.

    In Helsinki, Donald Trump was asked if he believed Vladimir Putin's words over "your own" intelligence agencies.  Of course, the CIA and the FBI are not Trump's intelligence agencies, nor George Bush's, nor Ronald Reagan's, nor John F Kennedy's.  They are America's.  That has been the rule.

    During the previous administration, however (aka the one under an allegedly scandal-free president), the CIA and the FBI — along with such departments as Justice and the IRS — indeed seemed to be Obama's and Clinton's intelligence agencies.  Didn't they run cover for the Democrat party while targeting conservatives and Republicans?  The question is, has that changed or are they — or are at least their top dogs — still beholden more to the Democrat Party than to the nation?

Today is George Bush's Birthday (George Turns 15)

Today George Bush will be celebrating his birthday. Some will protest and say, that's not true, the president's birthday was July 6. But we're not talking about the same person, apparently. Nor his father. Because this George Bush turns only 15 today.

The George Bush I have in mind is not the one whose full name is George Walker Bush, nor the one whose full name is George Herbert Walker Bush, but the one whose full name is George Bush Abdul Kader Faris Abed El-Hussein (no relation to Saddam). And this George Bush was born in Baghdad on July 11, 2003. (Update: Shookhran to Instapundit's Stephen Green.)

From a post of one decade ago:

As far as can be ascertained, George Bush’s parents named him in honor of some Western leader one of whose recent feats they found to be not only impressive and admirable, obviously, but worthy enough to name their new-born son after. They must have been plenty impressed, in view of the fact that they gave their child the name of someone not of their faith, with linguistic roots not of their culture. (Sort of like a Westerner — say, someone from the Bush clan — giving a newborn son a name such as Mohammed Ahmed Yusuf Bush.)

Now, here is what I suggest. I suggest that the West should send a number of representatives to Baghdad. The type of people that David Brooks calls “the members of the sneering brigade”, “the think-tank johnnies and the rest of the commentariate” in “their usual sky-is-falling mode” — people like José Bové, François Hollande, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, José Luis Zapatero, Jean-Marie Colombani, Plantu, Willem (to name only the Europeans), etc… They should choose a couple of high-visibility VIPs, “arm” them with all the usual arguments, and send them to Baghdad.

And there, they should seek out the parents of George Bush. Once the couple has been found, they should patiently explain the “truth” to them and seek thereby to install some common sense in them. That would include telling them…

• that the war was unnecessary and a sham, conducted for bogus reasons;
• that Iraq, and the world, were far better off before the conflict;
• that the presence of foreign soldiers is “humiliating” for George Bush and his fellow countrymen;
• that they must resent America (or at least, the Bush administration) for the current situation in which thousands have been killed over a period of more than three years and hark back to the previous situation in which the secret police killed several thousands per month with total impunity;
• that, in contrast to the administration of George Bush’s namesake, they, the holier-than-thou members of the peace camp, had (and have) nothing but the best interests of his parents in mind;
• oh, and, of course, that George Bush’s namesake is nothing but a nincompoop and a despicable liar.

Once the parents of George Bush have been converted to the sky-is-falling truth, the “the members of the sneering brigade” could go to work convincing more of Iraq’s population.

The members of “the commentariate” could start with Mohammed, Ali, and Omar, the brothers from Iraq the Model and expand outwards, to include the Iraqis who lost hands and tongues to Saddam’s thugs, had their faced scarred by acid, had their sisters, mothers, and daughters raped, and had their parents, brothers, and children shot down and their bodies thrown into unnamed graves. With luck, “the think-tank johnnies” would eventually reach that vast majority of people who in polls believe life has never been better since the war toppled Saddam and who say they feel more optimistic than they ever had in the past.

Let us join together and wish them “good luck and godspeed with your sacred mission”.

Oh, and by the way, Georgie: Happy birthday!

Related: There's a new George Bush in Baghdad,
six weeks old and screaming in a crib
• Nadia Jergis Mohammed, 34, … told Associated Press Television News:

"I tell you all Iraqis hated Saddam's regime. It was only George Bush who liberated us, without him it wouldn't have happened. If he hadn't done it the sons of Saddam would have ruled us for years. He saved us from Saddam and that's why we named our son after him"

Related: George Bush of Iraq, Meet Little Trump of Syria…

July 4th Celebrated on French Radio

Pour le 4 juillet 2018, le Libre Journal du Nouveau Monde fêtait l'indépendance américaine avec une émission de une heure et demie sur Radio Courtoisie (dank U wel à KC).

---

Evelyne Joslain, assistée de Stanislas, reçoit :

• Erik Svane, membre du groupe des Républicains à Paris
• Paul Reen, membre du groupe des Républicains à Paris

Thème : “A l’occasion de l’indépendance des Etats-Unis, point sur l’actualité américaine”

Let’s be honest, the ACLU has never defended all freedoms for all people; For example, it rarely, if ever, defends the Second or Tenth Amendments

If the American Civil Liberties Union was ever a champion of its supposed namesake — civil liberties — it no longer is. 

Thus writes Benny Huang.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the ACLU has quietly drafted new guidelines that address which legal battles it will wade into. Civil liberties are now being balanced with other considerations.

In an eight-page memo, the ACLU agonized over whether and when to lend a helping hand to people it clearly despises. It did not categorically reject the possibility that the organization would defend deplorables’ civil liberties, but it left itself plenty of weaselly escape hatches.

It’s complicated, you see. Really, really complicated.

I suspect that the ACLU has always quietly exercised discretion when choosing its cases even if it didn’t say so publicly. To be sure, even these guidelines were for ACLU eyes only, a clear indication that the organization still wants to be perceived as stalwart defenders of the Bill of Rights.

Maintaining the organization’s public image is paramount. As former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said in a recent interview, “The ACLU defends all fundamental freedoms for all people.”

But it doesn’t and, let’s be honest, it never has. For example, the ACLU has never filed a Second Amendment lawsuit. Their Bill of Rights apparently includes only nine amendments. Or is it eight? Despite the federal government’s extreme overreach, the ACLU rarely sues the federal government for violating the tenth amendment. The ACLU does however fight valiantly for “a woman’s right to choose” (to kill her unborn baby) even though that one doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. Clearly there’s an agenda here beyond motherhood and apple pie.

The ACLU is now admitting that there are lots of factors that need to be considered before taking a case. The first question that needs to be asked is whose rights are being trampled? Is it good people or bad people? Its own side or the other side? Supposed oppressors or the supposed oppressed?

 … While the memo stresses that the ACLU might still decide to take on such cases, it isn’t automatic.
 

And so the great climbdown begins. The ACLU, that great defender of free speech even when it’s inconvenient, is now affixing caveats.

But at least it’s finally admitting what I have been saying for a long time, namely that there’s a conflict between fundamental constitutional principles — free speech, free exercise of religion, a free press — and what they like to call “justice,” which is nothing more than code for their political agenda.

And make no mistake about it, their agenda creates a lot of “tension” — a word that appears eight times in memo — with Madisonian rights. The ACLU will now approach this tension gingerly, hoping that no one notices that it’s deserted its core mission of defending the Bill of Rights. People will just have to understand that its members failed to defend our supposedly inalienable rights only after serious deliberation that made plenty of allowances for, as they call it, “nuanced and intentional consideration of the competing interests.”

At the core of these guidelines is the tacit admission that the ACLU’s “values” are in fact antithetical to the Constitution. On this we can agree. Clearly the ACLU has arrived at a time for choosing even if it doesn’t want to admit it.

Throughout our history there have always been constitutional violations and in every case they were defended by people who believed they had other, more important interests to uphold, such as the protection of public morals, the dignity of the family unit, or wartime necessity, to name a few.

This last justification for ignoring the Constitution is what eventually gave birth in 1917 to the National Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), forerunner to the ACLU. It was a tumultuous time, with the United States committing itself to war in Europe over the stringent opposition of socialists, communists, and anarchists. Citing the need to mobilize the country for “the war to end all wars,” the U.S. government cracked down on dissent. The CLB argued (correctly) that there was no wartime exception to the civil liberties safeguarded in the Constitution.

[The ACLU memo] is obviously a veiled reference to the recent Masterpiece Cake Shop decision, which was, at the time this document was written, on its way to the Supreme Court. The memo is clearly implying that Colorado really was violating two of the First Amendment’s clauses — free speech and free exercise of religion — but the ACLU just doesn’t care. “Equality” was more important.

In any other context I have no doubt that the ACLU, with its expansive view of speech, would have come to the aid of an artisan compelled to use his talents to create a message of which he disapproves. But not when it’s a Christian baker who doesn’t want to custom-design a cake for homosexual nuptials. “Gays” good, Christians bad.

It would have been bad enough if the ACLU had refused to take on the Christian baker’s case because of other, competing, anti-constitutional values. But it went further than that. It litigated the case from the other side. Not content to stand on the sidelines while Jack Phillips’s constitutional rights were being savaged, the ACLU decided to jump in and get some blood on its own knuckles.

Not that it would ever admit this openly. In court the ACLU attorneys argued that Jack Phillips’s rights were not being violated, which is a more compelling argument than “Yeah, but so what?”

 … The ACLU is suffering from a bad case of cognitive dissonance, trying to navigate a course between what it thinks it stands for and what it actually stands for. It can have the Constitution or it can have its agenda, but it can’t have both.

The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A World of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

The more you think about it, the more you realize how brilliant it was for Donald Trump to state in his first State of the Union address that "Americans are dreamers, too."

In that short phrase, indeed, the president took on what is the entire worldview of the left in a nutshell.

The world perspective of the Democrats in the Donkey party and their allies in the Democracy-Dies-in-Darkness media can be called the Dichotomy of the D's.

The "basket of deplorables" is not just a Hillary Clinton expression for those "offensive, hateful, mean-spirited" Republicans who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." 

A Deplorable turns out to be the description of every "normal" bourgeois Westerner (first and foremost Americans).

Dreamers, by contrast, are not just the nickname given to young illegal immigrants who, according to DACA, ought to be allowed to remain in the United States. Anybody and everybody who is opposed to the above-mentioned caste of untouchables turns out to be some type of a Dreamer.

• Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

From illegal aliens to foreign leftist dictators, the population of the planet turns out to be formed almost exclusively of admirable and deserving dreamers, all the forward-looking prophets in America and just about all the foreigners in the world.

With one glaring exception: all red-blooded Americans and every one of their allies abroad.

Think about it:

Isn't it true that, basically, you can take any position of the left these days — the people who could best be described as drama queens — and apply the D Dichotomy to it: it all turns out to be about the Deserving Dreamers versus the Despicable Deplorables

• Right-wing Conservative journalists, undercover reporters, and/or other conservative activists are called "despicable" by such people as the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, who goes on to say that a real journalist "has to have in his or her heart a desire to make society better" — in other words, the real MSM operative has to be some sort of a dreamer.

Thus it is hardly surprising to find a Times op-ed saying that the ignorant do not have the right to an audience. (The author turns out to be Bryan W Van Norden, “a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University” and therefore, according to Robert Shibley, an employee of the Chinese Communist government. But hey! Don't communists turn out to be dreamers, too?! Fear not, we will get back to the subject…)

• Ted Cruz, during the 2016 debates, echoing Newt Gingrich during those of 2012, summarized the mainstream media's outlook well: explain to us why you Republicans are such cartoon caricatures, while for the Democrats, the questions were: Tell us about your sublime plans (your glorious dreams) to bring our nation, our planet, towards a bright shining future.

Where conservatives are involved, it is, it must be, about the personal, because these deplorable beings are driven by greed or by politics and have nothing but nefarious schemes. They may say the same exact thing as a liberal and have a similar policy to that of a Democrat, but should that happen, it can only be attributed to politicizing and other types of hypocrisy.

Leftists, by contrast, are always, and only, driven by the highest of principles, by their dreams.

Turn back to Barack Obama's Hope 'n' Change. As Ann Althouse points out, this is the dream of destitute people in need. (But conservatives are not against people in need per se; they are for people being, or bringing themselves, "outside" of need — preferably, if and when possible, through their own efforts.)

Think of the adulation (past and/or present) afforded to such people as Che Guevara, Hugo Chávez, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx, as well as, last but not least, the author of Dreams From My Father and Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, the president who dreamed (and dreams) of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America", i.e., the land of the haters, the (fill-in-the-blank)phobes, and… the deplorables.

Homosexuals, women, blacks, transgenders, illegal aliens, even children and… the mentally ill (!): every minority is composed of victimized, and martyred, dreamers yearning, and deserving, to break free, to tell their story, to give their special brand of wisdom, while every member of the majority, every Christian, every member of the white race (unless they turn good and side with the dreaming leftists or at least pipe down) is an oppressor, a bad person, a despicable deplorable.

(Why do so many American, and Western, citizens, go along with this? Because they get to take pride in being part of the small, élite band of good guys, the club of the virtuous, those wise beings who see how terrible their neighbors in the general population are…)

Here are some more illustrations:

• Why were fans of Jimmy Fallon upset that Donald Trump appeared on his show during the 2016 campaign? Because a dreamer, or someone admired by dreamers, managed (almost?) to make a human being out of a deplorable, i.e., a monster.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel's tears on ABC are clearly the antics of a dreamer upset with the decisions of the deplorables who no longer want to follow the aspirations of his class.

• Stormy Daniels may be a porn star while Sarah Huckabee is a government spokesperson, but Stormy is a dreamer, or on the side of the dreamers (or certainly not actively against the dreamers), while Sarah is one of the deplorables. (Indeed, even adult actors are not in the same class as deplorables, as can be evidenced on Twitter, which likes nothing better to censor the tweets of conservatives such as Stacy McCain, Milo Yiannopoulos, Kevin Williamson, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, Sheriff Clarke, Mark Dice, and Breitbart, but for which the XXX-rated photos and the hard-core videos of professional porn stars (NSFW) are entirely permissible.)

• As for any leftists, in Hollywood or elsewhere, bold enough to suggest that any of these monsters might be something as innocuous as… "a genuine person" — or that we shouldn't criticize a fellow leftist for being willing to [cross] the aisle and being open to making precisely such a comment — woe upon those heretics and upon their careers.

• Why is Roseanne punished for a personal tweet while Samantha Bee, Kathy Griffin, and Michelle Wolf get little to no blowback for their expletive-sanctioned shows?

Well, because conservative comics have no excuse for being the despicable deplorables they are, while liberal comics have the excuse that y'know, deep down, they are… deserving dreamers, Hollywood dreamers who to boot manage to correctly identify and mercilessly mock the wicked enemy.

• This is why Hollywood lies about its blatant liberal bias: The artists are the dreamers forced to hide, at least partially, their agendas, i.e., their dreams, because the content thereof is (sigh! how unfortunate!) something the clueless deplorables would never be able to understand. (Needless to say, this is what, in the Ghostbusters reboot or in the Star Wars universe, causes Hollywood (creators and journalists alike), to blame the the fans for not being woke enough.)

• Also, when leftists find excuses for the criminal class while blaming society, what they are basically doing is calling the criminals a type of dreamers whose pipe dreams where shattered by the deplorables of the "normal" bourgeoisie and by the disgraceful society that they or their forefathers created.

• Because deplorables are clueless clods, because Americans are terrible citizens, because “arch-conservatives” are “kooks,” “crackpots,” and “crazies”, it is okay — even necessary and recommended and, yes, encouraged, not to mention, as it happens, rib-tickling — to pull the wool over their eyes. (See the Obamacare promise and Obama's Iran deal…)

Of course, when leftists deplore the stupidity of the American voter or call Americans ignorant hillbillies or opine that Americans are Either Really Stupid or Incredibly Bigoted… Really, Really Dumb People, they are not really making a dispassionate comment on the IQ of the average American, a topic that is open for debate and discussion. Members of the tribe of the virtuous are outraged that the deplorables do not share, or do not support, the dreams of the leftist dreamer class.

Why, by the way, do so many "independent" journalists turn out to be Democratic operatives with bylines? Because, almost of necessity, by the very nature of their work, they must start out as, or become, drama queens — always in search of a crisis, real or otherwise.

Try taking Jim Treacher's ever-green definition of modern journalism and substitute a few choice words for "Democrats":

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on the Dreamers and on the drama queens and on the crisis finders/crisis creators.

Now try doing the same with Iowahawk's journalism definition:

Journalism is about covering important stories detrimental to Dreamers and to drama queens and to the crisis finders/crisis creators. With a pillow, until they (the important stories) stop moving.

Speaking of which, an institution created (no matter how many decades or centuries ago), and run, by deplorables is an abomination; headed by dreamers, it is deserving of nothing but the utmost respect…

Head over to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and see if the deplorable/dreamer dichotomy doesn't make sense in the following sentence:

That is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary [i.e., deplorable] voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive [i.e., dreamer] voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

First Amendment rights must be curbed because it enhances the deplorables' free speech to the detriment of the aspirations of the dreamers. As Ben Shapiro writes,

Free speech is just another element of a corrupt republic that must be torn down brick by brick in favor of a better world. When you see Donald Trump as the final iteration of a hierarchical system built to prevent the world from achieving utopia, that system must be dismantled — starting with the freedoms that allowed Donald Trump to become president. It’s that simple for the Left.

With several examples of how dangerous and insane liberals have become, Matt Tapscott asks, along with Craig Shirley and Scott Mauer, why liberals are always so violent.

Easy. Because they are drama queens. Drama queens who split the world into two — Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.

This is why leftists, aka dreamers, cannot maintain peaceful and reasonable discourse, and why protests turn vicious, dangerous, and personal.

Men, inches from her face, screaming at [Florida attorney general Pam Bondi] and blocking her path

In their immigration furor, the spitting mad dreamers can barely tolerate moderate Republicans.

All of these haters must be as bad as fascists. All of them must be as bad as Adolf Hitler.

Because deplorables are such horrid people — can those monsters even be termed human beings?! — they must, in one way or another, be made to shut up.

It is always okay to believe the worst of these "untouchables" and to go about punishing them in any which way possible, from Facebook bans and doxxing to licking their doorknobs and spitting in their food. Not to mention (cough) incivility, blacklisting, and assassination, along with family strife, mainly dreamer parents not letting deplorable grandparents see their grand kids.

You get the picture.

This article has lasted long enough.

Let's end it with a view on foreign affairs…

Why did the media ignore Barack Obama's faux pas and half-truths, fawning over his every move, while lashing out at every Trump White House?

As we have seen, because Obama was, and is, an admirable dreamer while Trump is, and was, a despicable deplorable.

What gave secretary of state Hillary Clinton the right to aim for a reset button with Moscow and Barack Obama license to whisper to the Russian president that he would be more flexible after the coming election?

Wouldn't you know it? The deplorables' foes are in fact no foes at all, only dreamers in their own right, and it is only the puerile bigotry of the despicable deplorables that makes them foes in the first place.

The Russians are (somehow) dreamers — that is, unless and until they are said to allegedly side with a Republican (of which, more 8 or 9 sentences down). In the Obama White House, as in the Carter administration, the Iranian ayatollahs are/were dreamers as well.

Go back further to the mid-1970s. Jimmy Carter tries to convince Americans to be more understanding and accepting of communism, while using human rights sanctions on such allies as the Shah of Iran. Why?

America's allies, being allies of the despicable deplorables, become despicable deplorables themselves — they run the gamut from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Chile's General Pinochet to Miami's Cubans and the Florida family members of Elián Gonzales — while the foes of the despicable deplorables (American or foreign) turn out to be no more than misunderstood dreamers.

In this respect, the basic message of the 1960s peace movement and all its Hanoi Janes amounts to  America's deplorables trying to prevent dreamers in North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Kong allies (all of whom were even called the equivalents of America's founding fathers) from realizing their aspirations.

Meanwhile, Americans are bitter and frustrated deplorables clinging "to guns and religion" who have no understanding of foreigners' aspirations and dreams.

All foreigners, all Europeans, in this grass-is-greener simplification, are dreamers — setting up roadblocks to hate speech, implementing gun control, guaranteeing universal healthcare…

Why, in the 1980s, would Ted Kennedy secretly contact Moscow to get the Soviets' help in defeating Ronald Reagan in the presidential election?

Because the leader of the Kremlin was, somehow, a dreamer in his own right while the Gipper was a war-mad deplorable.

Incidentally, as we have seen, Vladimir Putin was a dreamer with whom the deplorables could do business, if only they knew how to expand their vision and, like Barack Obama and the Clintons, be tolerant of and open to his personal dreams.

That is, until the Russian president was accused of having helped a despicable deplorable win the 2016 election, in which case the ally of such a monster instantly became a despicable deplorable himself.

What is it that, for a century now, has given the communists an excuse for the millions upon millions upon millions of citizens they butchered?

You know the line:

"They had good intentions." What does this mean?

They had constructive dreams. Yes, the communists, they were/are dreamers.

Joseph McCarthy was among the ultimate deplorables deserving of nothing but contempt and condemnation. Why so much paranoia about communists who were basically harmless?! Well, okay okay; sure there was that minor matter that they killed millions and millions and millions of Russians, and millions and millions and millions of Chinese, and millions and millions and millions of Cambodians, etc, etc, etc, but (!) c'mon — remember the communists were (or are) dreamers, and they had (or have) good intentions (good dreams)…

Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

Update: Andrew Klavan on PJ Media:

Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman's magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb-ass racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.

If you believe your country should vet its immigrants, you're racist. If you voted for Donald Trump, you're racist. If you make a joke about Barack Obama on Facebook, you're racist twice. If you think motherhood is a woman's highest calling, you're sexist. If you take it ill when Islamists blow you up in the name of their nasty little god, you're Islamophobic. If you know that a man is a man even if he says he's a woman, you're transphobic. If you think it's fair to debate whether homosexual actions are moral or not, you're homophobic.

Every day. From every outlet. All the time.

How can Nazis be called Right Wing when they denied individual liberty, responsibility, and property rights?

 … the words ‘never again’ are little more than a hollow slogan 

deplores Ed Kozak.

For if we refuse to accept, and more importantly challenge, the ideological origins of a movement that culminated in the systematic murder of millions of innocent human beings, there is absolutely no way we can prevent the same from happening again.

The easiest way of proving that the origins of Nazism are in no way remotely conservative is to start by looking at some defining features of conservatism itself, specifically the European variety.

These include: the belief that a society rooted in monarchy and aristocracy is preferable to mass democracy; that there is a transcendental moral order (what Kirk called the Permanent Things) which in Western Civilization has been preserved and passed down through the Christian Church; that property rights are the very foundation of ordered liberty; and, of course, the universal conservative belief that any necessary societal change must occur slowly and without structural damage to ancient and proven institutions – that problems in society come not from broken traditions and institutions but from broken men and morals.

It should go without saying that Nazism had no love of monarchy or aristocracy. Hitler didn’t reinstate the House of Hohenzollern; he made himself dictator. The notion that the son of a minor civil servant (Alois Hitler himself born a bastard and of peasant stock) had a right to rule over Germany can hardly be called traditionally conservative. Moreover, his great dislike of the aristocratic military establishment is well known; the lack of a ‘von’ in front of his surname was a permanent chip on Hitler’s shoulder. Granted, Himmler liked to play feudal lord with the SS, but his was a ‘feudalism’ based on a half-cocked interpretation of a quasi-mythical pagan past.

This brings us nicely to defining conservative feature number two: Christianity. Himmler’s obsession with paganism is very well-documented. Hitler may have viewed the SS as his personal bodyguard, but Himmler viewed them as a pagan Knights Templar, destined to recreate a utopic, pre-Christian Teutonic society.

Furthermore, the ‘official’ religion of Nazism was positive Christianity, a doctrine that can hardly be called positive or Christian. This ‘Christian’ ideology rejected the Jewish bible in its entirety, rejected Jesus’ Jewish origins, and wished to wipe Catholicism off the face of the earth (stalwart defender of tradition it is) and create a united Nazi protestant church.

Nor can it be said that the Nazis had any respect for traditional property rights. They nationalized industries, advocated progressive taxation schemes, and were virulently anti-capitalist. Now, that’s not to say that conservatism must necessarily be in favour of pure, unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism (see Kirk, Chesterton, etc.), but whereas the traditionalist objection to capitalism is at its heart an objection to the disastrous spiritual and moral effects of industrialisation, the Nazis’ objection to capitalism was rooted firmly in post-industrialist, Marxist interpretations of economics.

The conservative argues that socialism isn’t a cure for the disease of industrial society, but a symptom of the same sickness. As we all know, Nazi property violations weren’t limited solely to estate, they also infringed upon life and liberty with spectacular zeal, especially the life and liberty of those they deemed sub-human.

‘Aha’, says the skeptical reader, ‘this is where I have him! This crazy conservative doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just wrote it himself, the Nazis were a bunch of racists, surely that means they were right wing!’ Now, unlike you, my dear liberal reader, I understand that man is fallen, so I’ll forgive you your ignorance on the matter. First, let’s briefly get this ‘right wing’ thing out of the way, shall we?

Yes, fascists and Nazis were almost from the start called ‘right wing’, but this was a slander employed by other socialists, meant to discredit these socialists of a distinctly nationalist bent in the eyes of fellow radical travelers. If they were ‘right wing’ at all they were the ‘right wing’ of the left.

As Jonah Goldberg explains in his brilliant (and apparently woefully under-read) Liberal Fascism, this is why street fighting between fascists and communists was so vicious in Germany; these people were fighting for the same hearts and minds, the same segment of middle class voters susceptible to revolutionary nonsense. The godfather of fascism himself, Mussolini, was a member of [the Internationale], and the term ‘national socialist’ was in use in leftist circles well before the Nazi party was created.

Now, let me be as clear as possible on this subject: ethnic nationalism, let alone racism, is in no way conservative. The scientific racism of the Nazis, so popular across Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century until the devastating and inevitable result of its assertions, would never have developed if not for nationalist movements.

Nationalism as we know it was one of the earliest leftist ideologies, and remains fundamentally left wing, going hand in hand with identity politics. It was forged, as almost all ideological poisons that plague us today, in the fires of the French Revolution, and developed as a means of undermining the old European order, specifically the grand and, more importantly, multi-ethnic empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and, to an extent, Britain.

The idea that countries should be based on single ethnic groups – the promotion of nation states – is an ideologically radical position. To a conservative, culture, not race, is what matters. The cry of the National Socialist is blood and soil, race and nation. The cry of the conservative is king and country.

Thus do the intellectually honest arrive at the inescapable conclusion: Nazism is not conservative. And if it is not conservative, it cannot be truly called right wing. It is a product of the French Revolution, just another bastard child of Rousseau’s love affair with himself, simply one more in a long line of deformed, monstrous political creatures to slither its way out of the primordial Jacobin soup.

The fact that Central and Eastern Europe (really all of Europe for that matter) have a long and at times vicious history with anti-Semitism is well known, and frequently referenced when discussing collusion with Nazis in occupied countries.

What is noted with far less frequency, and is far more important, however, is that fact that not until the dissolution of the Christian monarchies and the introduction of mass democracy was there an organised, systematic attempt to wipe out European Jewry (if you think the Holocaust is in any way comparable to the Inquisition in premise or scope, you comprehend neither). In fact, between the time the Christianization of Europe was completed and the French Revolution, there were really no organised, systematic attempts to wipe out anyone in Europe.

This is the obvious truth we ignore when we censure and censor people who would accurately link Nazism with leftism. Political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn articulated this truth brilliantly:

The fatal year is 1789, and the symbol of iniquity is the Jacobin Cap. Its heresy is the denial of personality and of personal liberty. Its concrete realizations are Jacobin mass democracy, all forms of national collectivism and statism, Marxism producing socialism and communism, fascism, and national socialism, leftism in all its modern guises and manifestations to which in America the good term 'liberalism,' perversely enough, is being applied. The issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise.

Only a German people ripped from tradition, a German people starved of Judeo-Christian morality, drugged with the false promise of a better future, and subjected to the authority of those who have no right to it, could stand by and watch, at times cheer even, as millions of human beings – precious, living, breathing human beings – were systematically herded up like cattle and sent to be exterminated like termites.

Make no mistake. There is little difference, if any, in principle between fascism, communism, and progressivism – between Soviets, Nazis, and today’s UK Labour Party or US Democratic Party. The difference lies only in the degree to which those ideological principles are followed through.

All promise a utopian future, to be attained by sacrificing tradition at the altar of progress. All deny class distinctions as well as the old order, politically rooted in Feudalism, morally rooted in Christianity. They deny individual liberty, responsibility, and property rights. And most importantly, perhaps not to be counted among the ideological tenants listed above, but as a result of them, they inevitably end up denying the sanctity and value of human life.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, an elderly Jewish rabbi becomes nothing more than a germ, merely to be cleansed. In Soviet-occupied Lithuania, a respectable businessman becomes an enemy of the people, merely to become part of a statistic.

Students across the globe rhetorically ask how people could participate in something as evil as the Holocaust. The answer is simple: It is the easiest thing in the world to commit evil when one doesn’t believe it to be such, when one exists in a society governed by moral relativism. The choice is indeed between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise. Those who would obfuscate the ideological and philosophical origins of Nazism have made their choice known.

BREAKING: Justice Kennedy to Retire from the Supreme Court

Are we getting tired of winning or what?!

Justice Anthony Kennedy announces

that he is retiring, giving President Trump a critical opportunity to move the Supreme Court more solidly to the right in what promises to be an epic confirmation fight.

National Review's Jack Crowe:

Kennedy’s retirement, effective July 31, will set up a high stakes political battle over his replacement’s nomination.

Kennedy, 81, established himself as as a sought after swing vote for the court’s liberal justices, casting the deciding vote on issues ranging from abortion and affirmative action to capital punishment and gay rights. He announced his retirement in a letter to President Trump.

God bless America, land that I love…



Fox News' Bill Mears and Shannon Bream:

Trump, reacting to the news, called Kennedy a "great justice" and said he'd begin the search for a replacement immediately.

Arguably the most powerful member of the Supreme Court, Kennedy's moderate-conservative views often left him the "swing" -- or deciding -- vote in hot-button cases ranging from abortion to gay rights to political campaign spending.

A Supreme Court vacancy will likely become a key issue in a midterm congressional election year, when control of the Senate is at stake.

Donald Trump at CPAC

True to his promise from 2017, Donald Trump returned to the CPAC gathering at the Gaylord Hotel to a rousing speech.

The two photos above were taken by White House photographer Neshan Naltchayan (Twitter). 


Who dat at 2:08?

These men didn’t want a cake, they wanted to find a Christian and ruin him

This week, Christian baker Jack Phillips won the narrowest of victories at the Supreme Court

writes Benny Huang,

when seven justices sided with him in a case involving a Colorado private sector nondiscrimination law.

As many commentators have noted, the court seems to have dodged the Big Question at the heart of the matter—whether private sector nondiscrimination laws can be used to compel artisans to create messages that they object to. In one of the greatest copouts of all time the court ruled in Phillips’s favor only because members of the Colorado “Civil Rights” Commission (chortle) displayed clear bias against his religion.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

And that’s an understatement. One commissioner, Diann Rice, sounded much like that blithering idiot who comments on every news item that involves our first freedom:

“Freedom of religion and religion has [sic] been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust. I mean, we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use – to use their religion to hurt others.”

Yeah, because everyone knows that the Nazis were huge advocates for religious freedom.

Actually, no they were not. … The Nazis were opponents of both religious freedom and religion generally.

If the Holocaust teaches us a lesson it’s about state power and the suppression of dissent not that religious freedom is dangerous.

And make no mistake about it, Diann Rice is terrified of religious freedom. When arguments like hers are advanced, we’re no longer having a conversation about what religious freedom means but rather whether it should exist. …

In a way, this supposedly groundbreaking decision was anticlimactic. Government bureaucrats will continue to use these abominable laws as weapons against people of faith, they’ll just be more circumspect in their remarks. No more comparing peaceful noninterference in someone else’s wedding to the slaughter of eleven million innocents. No more berating the victims of these laws as religious bigots. They’ll even pretend, as Diann Rice didn’t, to respect religion and the free exercise thereof.

But nothing will really change.

Why? Because these laws do not impinge on free exercise and free speech rights by happenstance. This is not like a Muslim woman claiming that she’s been discriminated against because she can’t board a plane while wearing a veil over her face. This is targeted retribution against people who harbor views that are disfavored by the state.

Which is what the First Amendment was designed to protect us from. If it fails us now it’s worthless.

When the government uses laws to target certain groups of people, it is treading on constitutional thin ice. Liberals seem to understand this which explains why they constantly argue that perfectly reasonable laws that seem neutral on their face are in fact discriminatory. These laws disproportionately impact one group or another—but usually blacks. The reason for this, of course, is that blacks offend nearly all laws at higher rates than the general population.

Nonetheless, liberals see discrimination hiding behind every law. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, for example, recently announced that his office will no longer prosecute possession of small quantities of marijuana because that’s raaaacist! In 2016, Gotham also “decriminalized” littering and public urination because those laws are racist too.

Any law that liberals don’t like is immediately attacked as discriminatory. Felon disenfranchisement laws, literacy tests, mandatory minimum sentences, even laws against loitering. An Obama-appointed federal judge recently found Texas’s voter ID law to be racist in intent and effect. How the court discerned the intent is very much unclear because there was no smoking gun. If it feels racist it must have been intended as racist.

The voter ID case raises some interesting questions. Is a law’s effect on one group sufficient to strike it down? Or is intent required too? If the effect is so manifest that it can’t be denied, can intent be inferred as the judge in the voter ID law case appeared to do?

I ask these questions because the law that Jack Phillips just beat in court is actually biased in effect and intent. The impact here does not just fall “disproportionately” on people of faith; it falls exclusively on us! While liberals may pretend not to detect the bias inherent in this law, I suspect that they really just love the discriminatory effect too much to part with it.

There’s some evidence that Jack Phillips’s business was targeted precisely because he was known around town as a deeply religious man. Much like Hobby Lobby, faith was integral to his business’s brand. Phillips had previously declined orders for Halloween-themed baked goods, divorce parties, and bachelor parties.

Then one day in 2012, Dave Mullins and Charlie Craig entered the shop and tried to order a wedding cake, which was a strange request considering the fact that they were actually having their ceremony 2000 miles away in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They later claimed that they wanted a pre-wedding party locally though I suspect that all they really wanted was to provoke a fight.

Jack Phillips, who mistakenly believed that he lived in a free country that respected its citizens’ rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, thought that he could decline this order just as he had other orders in the past. By Mullins’s own admission he exploded in anger, shouting “Fuck you and your homophobic cake shop!” …

And we’re supposed to believe that this was about equal access to goods and services.

There were plenty of other bakeries that would have gladly accepted their money. Phillips’s rights should not hinge on this fact but it happens to be true. These men didn’t want a cake, they wanted to find a Christian and ruin him.

But that’s not all they wanted. Laws have the ability to change hearts and minds—and not always gently. I don’t like this aspect of laws, of course, because I am extremely wary of governments sanctioning official beliefs and punishing all others.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, for example, wrote a column in 2015 in which he expressed his view that church leaders need to face pressure to “take homosexuality off the sin list.” (Note to Bruni: only God can do that.) What’s worse is the context of Bruni’s column: he was writing about the controversy surrounding Indiana’s religious freedom law which he opposed. Clearly, he doesn’t like laws that might protect Christians from the legal pressure he wants to put on them to change their beliefs and eventually to change their churches’ doctrines.

I should really thank Bruni for his candor because he said what defenders’ of Colorado’s law wouldn’t dare say in court. The reason we have these laws is because society is in the midst of a revolutionary change and there can be no hold-outs. Government must lend a hand in corralling the last straggling institutions: churches.

Government has no business trying to change religious doctrine, not even by proxy. But that’s what it’s doing. It sees Big Religion as the last citadel of “homophobia,” a supposedly odious ideology that must be stamped out. They intend to achieve this by forcing Christians to make small compromises with their faith until they fully accept the homosexual agenda. Severe governmental penalties, including the loss of livelihood, have a tendency to make people rethink their core beliefs. This change in the individual Christians’ minds will put pressure on the churches to “take homosexuality off the sin list.”

And that’s why these laws offend the first amendment—not to mention the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments. Though the Supreme Court was too cowardly to decree it, there’s nothing neutral about “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination ordinances.

I’m happy that Jack Phillips was able to hold out against his tormentors but the rest of may not be so lucky because the state is on the tormentors’ side. Be forewarned: this fight isn’t over.