Ukraine Is Becoming Another Verdun

 

The war in Ukraine has gone on for four years—4.7 years. Feb. 24 of next year, it’ll be five years. It’s longer than World War I. It’s longer than the American Civil War. It’s longer than the U.S. Pacific War. There are about 2.5 million combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties.

I mean by that, of course, dead, wounded, missing, and captured. Russia does not have the economy or the military to absorb all of Ukraine. And Ukraine, with one-fifth the population of Russia, one-tenth the [gross domestic product], and one-twentieth of the area, cannot force Vladimir Putin out of either Crimea or the occupied Donbas territory.

And that means the only way that this Verdun or this Somme can be solved is for one side or the other to win, and it doesn’t seem like either can, or for a new power to join one of the two sides, or for them to agree to a ceasefire.

There’s another issue. In World War II, Winston Churchill held an election right after the German surrender, but right at the height of the Pacific War, and he was voted out of office. FDR had an election in 1944, right during some of the worst of the island-hopping and Pacific campaigns.

So, I’d like to make two initial points. I think it would behoove Mr. [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Ukraine in general, because they’re very angry that Donald Trump said they need a new president. I don’t think that was the right articulation, but what I think he meant was that Israel has an election coming up. It’s basically in a state of war.

It has a mixed or wartime cabinet. It would help Zelenskyy to restore habeas corpus, a free press and opposition parties, and have an election. And then we’ll see to what degree new people or new ideas in a campaign agree with Zelenskyy, sort of agree or reject him, or maybe the other participants will have a new idea.

The second thing is everybody just says, “[Vladimir] Putin’s awful.” I agree. “Ukraine should win.” I agree. But they never tell us how they’re going to achieve that after four and a half years. They criticize everything that Donald Trump has said, but there’s one constant. If you want to call all of his ideas crazy, whatever you want to do, there’s one common theme.

He doesn’t like all these people killing each other for no apparent purpose. There’s no change, really, in the momentum of the battlefield, and none of his critics and I’ve read a lot of them this week—say, “Donald Trump is wrong. This is what we must do to help Ukraine win the war and restore its territory.”

Nobody will take that leap. What’s the latest melodrama? The latest melodrama is that Donald Trump is less than three weeks from the election. Diesel is higher than gas. Diesel is the blood that makes the American economy flow. It’s up to way over $4.22. The average gas price is averaging about $5 to $5.50.

Here in California, it’s almost $8 in some places. So, obviously, he wants calm in the Strait. He wants to resolve the Iran war. He wants more refineries, and he wants Russia to start selling diesel and refined fuel on the world market. Even though it’s a small percentage, it’s psychological, and the world went crazy.

He was blasted as Putin’s puppet. The Europeans said he sold them out. The Canadians say he’s on Putin’s side. Zelenskyy said he was disappointed. But let me just remind everybody: We have given $140 billion to Ukraine. We are the ultimate guarantor of the safety of all the European countries that are talking about more aggressive action.

They should take more aggressive action, and maybe they should. But if they get in a jam with Russia, who are they going to call? Us.

More importantly, what has Europe been doing in the last four and a half years? It’s the greatest purchaser of Russian natural gas.

In other words, they are criticizing Trump for trying to put more diesel fuel on the global market from Russia, which will help Russia at a time when it’s attacking Ukraine, unfortunately. But they’re saying to Ukraine, “Do not hit refineries,” and the world is angry.

But Mr. Zelenskyy and the Europeans are not talking about the greatest source of Russian income right now: Europe’s massive purchases of natural gas.

So, you’ve got to stop. You don’t move—you’ve got to move it. Let me keep going.

Europe says that Russia is an existential threat. OK, it may be. It’s got 6,000 nuclear weapons. But right now, it is an existential threat to Ukraine and to Europe. We believe that the Iranian regime is more unhinged than Putin and not subject to the same degree of deterrence as China or Russia. It was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon and had been supplying the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah, which are the primary sources of tension in the entire Middle East.

So, we were trying to tell the Europeans, “OK, we’re going to give $140 billion to help you stop Putin. But all we want in return, in our effort to denuclearize Iran, is just your airspace. Can we land at a base or two so we can save transportation costs and probably save lives?”

And what happened?

The U.K. said, “No. In fact, there was an Iranian-inspired terrorist threat here against your bombers. We caught the guys, but guess what? They’re out on bail. We can’t protect you.”

So, we went home. Italy can’t let us land at that base in Sicily that’s a dual-use NATO base. Spain said, “Don’t use our NATO base, and don’t fly in our airspace.”

France said, “Do not use any French airspace.” I could go on. Diego Garcia—the U.K. said, “Don’t use it.”

So, just stop a minute and take a breath. What are they saying to us? They are saying, basically, “We are going to be beneficiaries of a denuclearized Iran, but we don’t want to participate.”

Fine, we didn’t ask you. “But we want to thwart your efforts to denuclearize by not allowing you to use NATO bases for the common good.

“But at the same time, we want you to intervene with us to help save Ukraine and all of NATO because Ukraine is an existential threat to us, and we don’t think Iran is an existential threat to you.”

And so, that’s the problem.

And the ultimate cause of all of these problems, I’ll be blunt, is that European GDP is flat.

European unemployment is skyrocketing. European borders are destroyed. European unassimilated and unintegrated Islamic minorities are gaining traction, and they make up 16% to 30% of the population. They’re voting, and they have control over the destiny of Europe. Europe is still basically disarmed. It’s trying to rearm, but very slowly.

Europe has a socialist economy like Canada, which has a very low fertility rate and very low GDP. Europe has 100 million more people than we do. It’s a $10 trillion smaller economy.

Europe, especially the U.K. and Germany, shut down coal, natural gas and nuclear plants and invested in very costly wind and solar, and they’re uncompetitive.

So, you add a Europe in crisis that is weakening, with its notions of grandeur from the past, when it had enormous military, political and economic power and influence and leverage, and they don’t match.

So, they are telling us all these things that we have to do, what we can’t do, and how awful we are, and we say, “If that’s true, you must be very, very powerful, but you’re not.

“You’re not. You’re like Canada.”

And so, what’s the result? We all want Ukraine to win. We all don’t trust Putin. But until—it’s easy to give criticism, but somebody should stand up and say, “I have a plan to stop Putin, and this is what we’re going to do: A, B, C, D, E, F.”

What have we heard? Crickets.

Why the French Riots May Be Coming to a Street Near You, and How You Can Stop It

 

person 1: France is ablaze yet again. Let’s talk about the riots. Now, a few things. The riots are not only in France, Belgium, and Italy, and now Albania also. And they’re being called student riots.

person 2: Yeah. They’re being called, outside of France, French riots

person 1: French, yeah. I’m sure many people who watch this show, listen, have seen the videos of the Limoges town hall, about 150 years old, burned this weekend.

Donald Trump has weighed in. He’s urged France to close its borders. He has called France ungovernable and the riots apocalyptic. The police have said in these cities they’re outmanned. So hundreds of thousands of protesters—they shouldn’t be called protesters—criminals taking to the streets of all the major cities.

And then we’re gonna talk about a particular case. But Victor, your thoughts?

person 2: Well, it is kind of Orwellian, isn’t it? That you bring in millions of people, many of them illegally, you allow, and then 45% of your budget is social welfare, and you’re up to 125% [gross domestic product] in debt, and you’re giving people cradle-to-grave social support.

The unemployment rate of new immigrants is almost 50%. And with all that, life is heaven in France compared to Somalia, the Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. And then you start to riot in league with students who are, I guess, upset about shoddy conditions in their high schools and all of that.

And then you get socialists fanning it on and there’s allegations there’s Chinese money involved. So you’re destroying this place, and you’re a guest in this country, even maybe you’re second generation, some of them. But compared to where you came from, it’s still heaven. And your attitude toward your hosts that welcomed you in is not magnanimity, it’s contempt.

And so, the host is getting very angry.

They are deliberately targeting iconic buildings. They went after a 19th-century government building that was a historical monument in one French city. There was a really disturbing scene in Milan where they were very close to the Duomo, that historic Christian church, and there were flames and everything.

And when you’re at 16%, 10%, 30% in Sweden maybe, then you start to see things. And one of the things you start to see is that these NATO countries will not support the United States and not even allow us to use their airspace because we are at war with a Muslim nation, and that resonates.

And even though they say, “We are the avatars of democracy and we support democracy,” and then there’s this little democracy in the Middle East, and they never miss an occasion to damn Israel and they’re boycotting produce and goods that are supposedly outside the 1947 or ’48 borders, and they’re siding with these radical Palestinians.

Remember, Europeans, you and the U.N. and the Bush administration said, “Hamas, we’re going to get all the Jews out of Gaza, and you can have an election.” And they had an election. There were no Jews since 2005. And what did they do? They threw all their opponents off high-rises and killed them, the Palestinian Authority rivals.

And then, for nearly 18 years, they didn’t build anything. For $40 billion in foreign aid from the U.N. and Europe, the United States, they built 350 miles of tunnels, and then they hid there while their civilians were used as shields, and then they slaughtered 1,200 Jews. That’s their experiment with democracy.

And you side with that over a free society in Israel. And so that’s their problem.

And it doesn’t do them any good, Jack, because they’re so paranoid about these unassimilated un-integrated populations that they turn on their protector, the United States. The only reason they said you can’t land here was Iran told them that we’re going to go after you.

And they did. They did do it at the RAF base in U.K. And so, they’re so scared of their own population that are Muslim and they get to go, “Well, if we help the United States, the Muslims, they may be mad at us, and they may riot.”

Well, they’re going to riot anyway. What good did that do to offend the United States and say, “You can’t use our airspace.You can’t land in Sicily. You can’t land in Spain. Now, Muslim populations, see what we did for you?”

And they said, “No. No. No. That’s not on our agenda, just, you know, helping Iran out. We’re going to take over the country because you don’t want it or you can’t defend it or you don’t deserve it, and we’re taking it over.”

And that’s their attitude. They don’t get it.

You know, our friend Bruce Thornton in 2007. He wrote a book called “Rise and Fall: The Slow-Motion Suicide of Europe.” And Roger Kimball published it at Encounter. It was a great book. It predated Douglas Murray’s book of nearly the same title by 15 years.

And he said in the book, as Mark Steyn did in his, “If demography continues as it does, if immigration continues as it does, as politics continue as it does, within 20 years, Europe will be unrecognizable.” And it pretty much was a prescient—a prediction.

person 1: Yeah. Well, here’s a case, Victor, of why should Europe be saved when Europeans are acting in this fashion?

So this is the micro version, Thomas Hobbes. It’s an ancedote, but I think it’s an important one. So here’s a—

person 2: Bellum omnia, bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of everybody against everybody.

person 1: Yeah. Well, here’s one everybody who’s a dirtbag. This is from The Mirror, London. “Rapist who killed police officer at World Cup fan zone gets one year in prison.”

So here’s the story. Bear with me, folks.

“Convicted rapist who punched and killed a police officer at a World Cup fan zone has been jailed for just one year. Father-of-two Christian Zedig, 32, was off duty and had gone to watch the match between Norway and Ivory Coast on a giant screen on June 30 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“When a fight broke out, he intervened and in the ensuing chaos was struck in the throat. When police arrived, they found Christian with life-threatening injuries as the blow had ruptured his artery. He died on July 3 at the hospital. Nkumba Ludovic Tshiembe surrendered to police and was remanded in custody but initially denied wrongdoing.

“He pled guilty eventually at an assault trial this week. At the end of the trial, he was sentenced to just one year in prison, and he was also ordered to pay some damages to the wife and the daughter of the slain police officer.”

Now get this: Tshiembe was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2017 for attempted murder after stabbing a man in the heart at a nightclub.

Before that, he had been convicted of rape. So this is who lives and breathes and destroys on the streets of Europe, and justice does not come to them ready for.

person 2: Did you see that interview with the editor-in-chief of The Economist with, I think her name is Alice Weidel? She’s the head of the AfD in Germany, Alternative for Deutschland.

And they were talking about this issue, what you’re talking about. And she was trying to get scare quotes that Ms. Weidel had said or her co-chair, I think his name was Chrupalla or something had said. And it was, “You say that these people who commit crimes are not wanted in Germany?”

“Yes.” “And you say if they are citizens, we can denaturalize them, or if they’re illegal, we can send them back?”

“Yes, of course. Why would we do that? Why wouldn’t we? They were guests. We gave them opportunities, and they broke the law. If they broke the law in coming here, they’ll have to go home. If they broke the law once they were citizens, they’re no longer citizens. We can denaturalize them. We can’t afford this.”

But she was just very calm, and you should have seen the interviewer. She was astounded. How can any European say this? But what I’m getting at is that stories like that, they’re not forgotten. They’re all memory-banked in the collective memory of 450 million Europeans, and it’s getting to a breaking point.

I think it’s kind of getting here in the United States. You know, there was a story about the New York Fashion Institute where two girls wanted to get some drug, I think cocaine, and they called up somebody, and he came with the intent of basically killing them and had pure fentanyl. Did you read about that?

And he gave them fentanyl, and one of the girls went immediately into a coma. She died. Both of them died. And she was completely naked, and he sexually assaulted her.

And there was another story in Boston where a—I think the person was in law enforcement, and he was in law enforcement barracks, and they found a naked girl walking across the street, and he had enticed her to come in and physically assaulted and raped her.

But the point is that that person had a long, like this person, and this is in the United States, had a long criminal record. And the other one, even though he was 19, I think he had a record. And we’ve had a lot of these sensational cases in California recently of sexual assault, pedophilia, fentanyl by illegal immigrants, and they all have prior records.

And so, you have to ask yourself, this is a Western disease, and we’re affluent in leisure at the end of history. We solved all the problems. We have our iPhones, our iPads. We got our Teslas. We got everything we want. And now we’re at the point where we can afford to feel magnanimous. Now, maybe the poor can’t, maybe the middle class can’t because they’re on the front lines of what we create, because we create chaos through our ideas, and then we retreat back to Menlo Park or Presidio Heights or Malibu, and then we’re safe.

We have our security, we have our money, and we have our nice ZIP codes, and we have private schools for our kids. But the theories that we advance about revolving door criminality, no bail, and decriminalizing theft, letting murderers out, that will fall on people that unfortunately we don’t really care about.

And that’s true in Europe and the United States. It’s the same thing. The only good thing about this horrific thing that’s happening is that we still have almost three weeks to look at what’s going on in Europe. And we should say what is going on in Europe is about a year and a half of what’s going on here.

And we’ve already seen some of it on the campuses of Columbia, at Stanford, trashing the president’s office in Philadelphia, chasing Jews into a library at Harvard, roughing up somebody and then getting an award at graduation, even though you roughed him up. And George Floyd, you know, 14,000 arrests, 35 people killed, $2 billion in damages, arson, da, da, da.

And you should vote against that. And there’s another thing to remember, and I’ll shut up. These people always, during the time—how do they get elected? Well, they get elected by saying things that they didn’t say before they ran for office. And they won’t say after they’re elected, whether it’s James Talarico here or Abdul El-Sayed or Millet Quiros.

Why is it that—take a guy like Paxton. He’s got a long record that he is ashamed of. He should be so—in some cases. Does he ever say, “I didn’t say that”? No. He just lives with it, and it’s authentic. Does Trump ever say, “Well, I kind of spoke out of turn, and I really didn’t mean that about Zelenskyy, that we need a new president”?

No. Whatever he is, he is. But why is it that all of these candidates, Talarico, El-Sayed, and people who were elected, Zohran Mamdani, why do they all, in Europe and in here, they cleanse, they purify, they excise their entire social media full of quotations? So Hasan Piker, he’s the only one that says—well, no, I take that back.

He’s now contextualizing his things that we deserve Sept. 11, and I hate the United States. He said that was rhetorical. Why is El-Sayed trying to get angry when you say he said, “Hurt people, hurt people,” after people tried to kill Jews in a synagogue?

Or why does he say, “That’s irrelevant, don’t bring that up.I was just talking on a hot mic when I said that my constituents might be happy or basically happy to hear the news of the death of the Iranian terrorist leader, supreme leader.”

Or why does Talarico say, “You know, I didn’t really mean that people with white skin are spreading a white skin virus. I didn’t mean that.”

Or why does Mamdani say, “Well, I really didn’t mean I want to go after whiter neighborhoods.” Or why does his housing head, I think Cea Weaver, why— Now she, “I really didn’t mean that when I said homeownership is a form of white supremacy.”

But my point is the Left always has to hide what they are, because if they told you what they are, nobody would ever want them.

And that’s what we should remember when we go into this election. What you’re seeing in Europe is what you’re going to get here, but they’re not going to tell you that.

If you hate beef and you hate fossil fuels, you’ll be like Talarico and put a cowboy hat on and be pictured in a Ram truck with a cowboy hat and eating a hamburger for a while, and then it will vanish when you’re in power.

So this unrest in Europe should be very didactic. It should really give us a glimpse of the future here if we continue down this path.

There’s a Reason Black Voters in Detroit Don’t Like Abdul

 

I don’t know where you grew up, but I grew up six blocks north of the Detroit border and one block south of 8 Mile Road, on “the bad side.” It wasn’t bad when I was a kid, or at least not as bad, and as I got older, I spent more time in the city. I went to college downtown at Wayne State and lived for a time in the Cass Corridor, back when that was not a place you wanted to be (it’s quite different now). I saw firsthand why there is distrust and dislike between black Detroiters and Arabs in the city, and I’m kind of surprised no one has talked about it in regard to why Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is doing so horribly with black voters.

Back in college, you didn’t really want to be on the streets in the Cass Corridor at night for too long, and you had to keep your ears open for sounds that set off your senses. I spent a lot of time there, and lived on 3rd Street and Cass for a while, because it was cheap, and that’s where the people from the theater department lived, as it was right near where our classes were. (Yes, I was a theater major for a year, mostly because I was aimless; it was fun and easy, I was good at it and the girls were good-looking.)

There were liquor stores and bars all around that neighborhood; most are still there. The bars were full of regulars of all ethnicities, but largely Vietnam veterans, which was not great for meeting girls (it is a very large commuter college, something like 25,000 students, with very limited on-campus housing and very few people living off campus because it was dangerous).

The liquor stores, or as they’re called in Michigan “party stores,” were a sea of fluorescent lights and plexiglass.

One thing you learn about party stores in Detroit is most have an unwritten rule: if you can carry it to the counter, they will sell it to you. If you look lost, confused, guilty or scared, they won’t. But if you act like you’ve done it before, you can buy anything, even the alcohol behind the glass. Money is money.

But the tension between the people on each side of the plexiglass was palpable. As a white kid, I was in the distinct minority, though by no means alone. Arabs owned and worked in the stores, sitting inside the glass, and black people were the vast majority of the people shopping there, as the city is more than 75 percent black. And they did not like each other.

Not everyone; there were plenty of older black men who’d hang out in the stores and shoot the breeze with the older Arab owner of the store, as they’d likely been seeing each other the majority of their adult lives. But younger men, on both sides of the glass, did not have that history or the respect that goes with it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’d seen shouting matches through the glass over price, the amount of money handed over or the amount of change given back; claims that someone was ripping them off, or the other person was literally stealing. So many threats of “kicking your ass” and calling the police, and the police were called a lot.

 There was no trust – as the owners saw their customers as likely thieves, and the customers saw the owners as racists ripping them off and taking the money out of the city, back to Dearborn.

It was a weird dynamic that didn’t involve most customers – black, white or whatever. Many times there would be yelling while the normal transaction was taking place between them, and others you’d conduct your transaction while the argument happened around you.

But it was clear that these two groups did not like or trust each other. Which was right and which was wrong did not matter, and does not matter; the animosity is there, and it’s not being addressed.

Abdul can’t take the side of Detroiters; that would anger his Arab voter base and a large group of his donors by calling them racists. And he can’t come right out and side with the store owners, as that would just reinforce the racism black Detroiters experience when they walk into those stores to buy milk, a loaf of bread or a six-pack. He’s stuck.

Mike Rogers can win more of the black vote out of Detroit than usual for a Republican by a couple of simple steps. First, ask for it – too many don’t bother. Second, skillfully point out how Abdul is more interested in the well-being of people on the other side of the planet than the people on the other side of the plexiglass, and Rogers will put Michiganders and Detroiters first.

Abdul can’t do that; it would cost him votes.

Unlike Abdul, the fight through plexiglass is one-sided for Rogers. He’s not going to win the Arab/Muslim vote, no matter what. What he can do is use that to take a chunk of the black vote from Abdul, or at least hope many people will stay home, as they’re unhappy with their usual party’s offering.

This is a prime example of the Left’s identity politics coming back to bite them. It plays well in gerrymandered districts, but less so statewide, and even less so statewide when a member of one of the groups they pit against each other for local control is on the ballot.

Let’s hope Mike Rogers knows this and spends some time in the last two weeks of this election taking advantage of it. Call me, Mike, I’ll hook you up.

We Know What Tipped Off the Feds About Ilhan Omar's Alleged Immigration Fraud

 Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) had her D.C. home raided this week as part of an ongoing immigration fraud investigation. We’ve known the rumors for years; now the Justice Department seems to be acting on them. Federal agents searched her home and seized her phone, computer, and passport. Omar’s personal life is rife with discrepancies. 

We know she misfiled campaign finance reports and her taxes — it’s all fishy. Now, we’ve learned her staff may have altered her date of birth in 2018 to align the timelines for her naturalization process. This probe began under President Joe Biden, so it’s not a witch hunt. And later learned that a major break in the case came from text messages from Omar’s sister, whose phone was taken earlier this year (via NYT):

    Federal investigators have been reviewing family text messages as they aim to build a case implicating Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, of conspiring to commit immigration fraud, three people familiar with the matter said this week.

    The messages were obtained from a phone that officials seized earlier this year from one of Ms. Omar’s sisters, Sahra Noor, a health care executive and author, according to the three people.

    The messages contained information that investigators had used to get a federal judge to authorize homeland security agents to search Ms. Omar’s Washington-area residence on Monday, the three people said. Agents spent hours searching the home of the congresswoman and were seen walking away with several boxes of seized items.

    The people familiar with the seizure of Ms. Noor’s phone spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an open criminal investigation that is before a federal grand jury in Minnesota. Federal officials have issued subpoenas in recent days to Ms. Noor and several other people in Ms. Omar’s orbit.

    The investigation seeks to determine whether Ms. Omar and her relatives lied or omitted crucial information in immigration paperwork they filed since moving to the United States in the 1990s. They were admitted as refugees after fleeing Somalia’s civil war.

    Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, suggested last month that the investigation could ultimately result in Ms. Omar’s deportation.

    The Justice Department on Friday did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Ms. Noor’s phone. It was not clear when or where her phone was seized.

    Ms. Noor, who recently published a memoir about her upbringing and the family’s journey to the United States, did not respond this week to several requests for comment. In recent years she has split her time between the United States and Kenya, and she spoke at events in the Minneapolis area this month to promote her book.

Recommended
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Sen. Slotkin Wants Young Conservatives Scared Off From Trump Administration Jobs Scott McClallen

A Democrat judge also signed off on the warrant, and raiding members of Congress’s homes isn’t exactly something a judge wants his or her name affixed to. If they do this, it means the evidence is pretty damning. Federal agents were also sifting through Omar's trash looking for DNA evidence, suggesting this might go beyond immigration fraud. 

Drip. Drip. Drip. 

It's Not a Christian Theocracy People Should Be Worried About

 

Wall Street Apes (WSA) is a popular account on X with 1.4 million followers. Among other issues, the author frequently posts about threats to the United States and other Western nations from Islamic migration and uses interviews with Muslims (and ex-Muslims) themselves to bolster his arguments.

Earlier this week, WSA posted about a new 5,000-square-foot Islamic superstore in Richardson, Texas, called Modefa and included what looks to be a commercial produced for the store. Smiling Muslim men and women walk the viewer through various departments, highlighting the store's offerings, including "a huge selection of women's modest fashion," "a variety of beautiful hijabs," kufis and thobes for men, prayer rugs, and Islam-themed home decor. The store also boasts of a family lounge and a prayer room.

WSA warns that this is just another step in the "Islamification" of America. He is not alone; others post similar warnings, including scholars Raymond Ibrahim and Robert Spencer, who point to Islam's history of infiltration, domination, and, ultimately, conquest. One sees plenty of social media posts urging Americans to band together to prevent the construction of mosques, madrassas (Islamic schools), Islamic centers, mini-cities, and retail establishments like Modefa that seek to "normalize" Islam.

Christians far outnumber Muslims here in the United States. According to polls, somewhere between 62 percent and almost 70 percent of Americans identify as Christians. Counting only adults (people 18 and over), that's nearly 180 million people. (Counting children in Christian families would add millions more.) By contrast, Muslims represent no more than 1.6 percent of the entire population — somewhere between 4.5 million and 5.5 million people.

And yet we now have cities governed by Muslims: Dearborn and Hamtramck, Michigan, for example. The current mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, was videotaped at a mosque recently, saying, "If the Muslim community votes, if the Arab community votes, we will determine every single position in the whole city." My friend Margot Cleveland, who lives in Dearborn, has sued the Muslim-dominated city government, alleging that it preferentially promotes Islamic religious displays while being "hostile to Christians and Jews" by forbidding the display of their religious holiday symbols.

The Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is Muslim. Rashida Tlaib, the congressional representative from Michigan's 12th district, is Muslim. Ilhan Omar, the congressional representative for Minnesota's 5th district, is Muslim; the 5th district has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. And of course, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is a Muslim.

Why is such a small population having such an outsized impact?

One reason is because so many Muslims want Islam to be central to every aspect of their lives, and they make their decisions accordingly. Whereas American Christians — despite their far larger numbers — have grown comfortable with the idea that Christianity need not be central to every aspect of their lives, and they make their decisions accordingly.

Additionally, too many Christians are cowed by inflammatory headlines or silenced by pervasive viewpoints that link Christianity with ignorance and violence.

A perfect example is former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who said last year that white men "of a certain religion" (Christianity) were responsible for "so much damage." Author Jer Swigart called white American evangelicals "the most dangerous people on the planet." Charles Matthews has written in the Washington Post, "White Christianity is in big trouble. And it's its own biggest threat." Christianity is often falsely linked to "white supremacy," as when former President Joe Biden bizarrely announced that "white supremacy is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland." (Biden's administration wasn't just concerned about evangelical Protestants; his FBI went after Catholics who attend the Latin Mass, calling them "radical traditionalist Catholics," or "rad-trads," and painting them as "potential domestic violent extremists.")

And then there are the secularists' accusations that, left to their own devices, American Christians would create a "theocracy."

That is nonsense on stilts. This country was founded in opposition to that very idea. The goal is not government-mandated religion but a culture dominated by Christians who live their values in their daily lives, so that government, with its inevitably oppressive force, can be limited and people can exercise ordered liberty.

By their silence, Christians have allowed the culture — our educational systems, our media, our entertainment industries — to be purged of Christianity and Christian values. The result is crime and societal chaos. That, in turn, produces demands for more and bigger government, despite the fact that government policies created — or exacerbated — the chaos in the first place. Coupled with certain distorted attitudes about multiculturalism popular with the Left, the result is government and popular culture that is openly hostile to the Christian majority but treats Muslims as an oppressed minority deserving of special protection.

Thus does Islam grow in strength, while Christianity recedes.

The irony, of course, is that once Muslims have enough voting power, they will vote for government officials, governmental structures, and public policies that impose Islam on everyone else. That is what their faith demands, as they are more than willing to say, and often do on social media and elsewhere.

If the trends we are seeing in European countries (England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden) take root here, those who oppose Christian-dominated culture and foment hysterical and baseless fears of a "Christian theocracy" will find themselves in an Islamic one.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Our willingness to pretend that secularism could preserve our way of life — and to allow Christianity to be forced to the sidelines — has created an opening for a tiny but passionate population that shows no such trepidation about their own culture and beliefs. The vacuum we have created will not be filled by banning Islamic stores and halal restaurants; we must instead redouble our efforts to strengthen Christianity in our personal lives, our families, and our communities, and to insist that Christian values are powerfully and positively represented in our educational institutions, media, businesses, and government. We have the numbers; we just need the commitment.

If Christianity is not the dominant cultural force in this country, something else will be.