Donald Trump’s call for a moratorium — “a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s Representatives figure out what is going on” — on Muslim immigration to America has of course caused outrage. Democrats, liberals, and libertarians (or liberaltarians), and even Republicans, have found renewed purpose in attacking Trump.
White House spokesperson Josh Earnest has announced that such a policy would be unconstitutional and that anyone holding it is unqualified to run for president. Lesser pajama boys and girls have announced that they will defriend anyone on Facebook who entertains such an idea, a tactic that will no doubt be adopted soon by the Obama regime in its war with ISIS, to supplement dropping leaflets on ISIS fighters and attending global warming conferences. Even very reasonable people, like Texas Rand Paulian political consultant Corie W. Stephens, are at the end of their rope: “This Donald Trump thing isn’t a joke anymore. Anybody supporting him is enabling bigotry and fascism, and ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
After an initial shock, center right media have come around to Trump’s idea. Aside from his devoted fans at Breitbart, Rupert Murdoch tweeted his support, and Charles Krauthammer and Tucker Carlson have opined that Trump’s proposal is understandable given Obama’s malign neglect. Interestingly, in a debate on its constitutionality with Laura Ingraham, Geraldo Rivera almost endorsed Senator Rand Paul’s similar proposal as the more reasonable alternative. Reports are that the GOP establishment now plans to torpedo Trump at a brokered convention.
Trump’s argument is that given the San Bernadino terrorist massacre, and how it revealed the complete failure of the Obama regime’s “vetting” of those to whom it grants Visas and residency permits, we should stop importing people among whom we know there will be evil doers, until we revamp those immigration policies and vetting procedures. Many people must agree, since he has risen in the polls since proposing the moratorium.
I think the anti-Trump animus of civil libertarians, and libertarians in particular, is overblown by far, because:
1) Trump isn’t a precise or careful speaker so I doubt he means much more than Rand Paul’s moratorium on, not Muslims, but unvettable refugees from countries ruled by Muslim theocracies that fund terrorism and are the origin point for recent terrorist killers.
2) Trump is a wrecking ball, who is aimed at so many of the right targets.
3) Trump, unlike Obama, is not fundamentally hostile to America, and if he tried to do something unconstitutional and the courts slapped him back, I don’t think he would hector them and just try to do it anyway by executive order. (Indeed criticizing Trump while defending or evading Obama perfidy is the hallmark of the airheaded libertarian wet.)
The outcry about Trump’s “fascism” seems silly. Even while spending the week gnashing their teeth and wailing about Trump, most of his critics overlook the very real civil liberties violations proposed by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Both have urged stripping Second Amendment rights to self-defense from actual American citizens, as long as an unknown bureaucrat has placed them on the “no fly” list without any due process. (I actually knew a Justice Department lawyer, a kind of libertarian-leaning liberal, who admitted at a social gathering that if she wanted to put, for example, an ex-boyfriend on the list she could, and it would take him a while to get off it.) On the left, only the ACLU seems to have criticized this denial of due process.
Obama has additionally had his Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, threaten the First Amendment rights to free speech of actual American citizens, by saying she will be watching if people say heated or critical things about Muslims in “backlash” to the San Bernadino murders.
In contrast Obama supporters keep speaking of American values that we must support that conflict with any care taken in who is coming into the country. By “American values” they don’t mean free speech, freedom of movement, or the Bill of Rights. They mean their belief that Americans owe foreigners in need assistance, just as Obama’s National Security Affairs advisor Samantha Powers believes we have a “duty to protect” foreigners, as opposed to intervening in other countries, if at all, primarily to protect our own national interest.
The American Muslim political class and its leftist organizations have their share of blame for Trump’s proposal and its popularity. At every step they have been tone deaf, as is the Obama administration. When 14 people were murdered by Islamic terrorists the Council on American Islamic Relations expressed “solidarity” with the grieving and used other irrelevant jargon, when what Americans wanted was to hear how they planned to clean their own house. Obama dithered and refused to name Islamic radicalism as the culprit and said we don’t know what the killers’ motives were. (When it comes to political correctness and the refusal to call out Islam, we should dust off the old AIDS activist slogan, SILENCE = DEATH.) Both CAIR and Obama clearly are unconcerned with whether innocent people are killed by Islamic terrorists. It may even be a means to their ends of pushing for gun control or other “transformations” of the America and Americans they hate.
Trump, ever the showman, is exposing the rot of American politics, which has now descended into two new degenerate phenomena: 1) Islamic denialism, where Democrats like President Obama and Hillary Clinton deny that terrorist murders are terrorist in nature and instead speculate that they may be workplace violence — and then deny, once they are shown to be terrorist in nature, that they were motivated by the killer’s dedication to Islam (as they understand it), even if the killer says they were, and 2) Muslimsplaining, where evasion, obfuscation, and deflection into irrelevancies — the killer’s beard, an argument with a co-worker, how the weapons belonged to someone else, why we should stop worrying about terrorism and should instead worry about a “backlash” against innocent Muslims, or the proliferation of guns — replace reporting the facts and coming up with policies to combat terrorism.