The media are reporting that President Donald Trump’s friendly Oval Office meeting with the soon-to-be mayor of America’s largest city, Zohran Mamdani, on November 21 roiled parts of the MAGA base. The New York Times was somewhat less optimistic in its assessment. “There was one moment when Zohran Mamdani seemed like he might have bit off a little more than he could chew by making his pilgrimage to the lion’s den that is President Trump’s blinged-out Oval Office,” Shawn McCreesh writes. “The 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York was pressed by a reporter if he thought his host, who was sitting about four inches away, was really ‘a fascist.’ How terribly awkward.” Indeed. “But before Mamdani could get out an answer,” McCreesh continues, “Trump jumped in to throw him a lifeline. ‘That’s OK, you could just say, Yes,’ Trump said, looking highly amused by the whole thing. He waved his hand, as if being called the worst term in the political dictionary was no big deal. ‘OK, all right,’ Mamdani said with a smile.”
The interpretation of this moment is easy to get right. Contrary to what progressives desperately want the public to believe, Trump is highly intelligent, and he played Mamdani like a fiddle. Being smeared as a fascist doesn’t play well today. Not just because of overuse, but because calling a liberal businessman from Queens a fascist is so inaccurate that it draws an eyeroll from those who hear it misapplied. They’re thought is: “There you go again.” By playing it cool, seated at the Resolute Desk, an imposing figure even while sitting down, Trump made Mamdani look small and insignificant. He let Mamdani, his arms folded in front of him like a schoolboy, do his thing: talk without saying anything. What anybody prepared to accept reality saw was the mayor-elect bending the knee to the President of the United States. Trump gave Democrats nothing. His strategy was obvious: when Mamdani fails, the Muslim’s sycophants won’t be able to talk about a confrontational moment at the White House.
What observers didn’t know was that Trump had something in his pocket. Just 72 hours later, the White House gave supporters (and most Americans, if they understood the situation), something they had long sought: an executive order that designated Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations: “Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury, after consultation with the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence, shall submit a joint report to the President, through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, concerning the designation of any Muslim Brotherhood chapters or other subdivisions, including those in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, as foreign terrorist organizations.”
Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Islamist movement that has influenced Islamist organizations and parties worldwide. The Brotherhood plays a chief role in the Islamization project. Trump’s EO allows the federal government to investigate, among other things, the Brotherhood’s public relations firm, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR). Founded in 1994, CAIR describes its mission as advocating for Muslim Americans, fostering understanding of Islam, and protecting civil liberties. The political action organization, Unity & Justice Fund, CAIR’s super PAC, donated thousands of dollars to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, one of the main PACs backing Mamdani. Mamdani is the smiling face of the Islamization project.
With this EO, Trump is signaling significant movement against the project. But he is doing much more than this. Indeed, even before the November 24 order, following his meeting with Mamdani, Trump ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis in Minnesota. On November 27, the President announced a review of green cards for Afghans—along with holders from 18 other “countries of concern.” The review was triggered by the targeted shooting on November 26 of two National Guard members, who were ambushed near the White House by an Afghan refugee. The Afghan, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who had previously worked with a CIA-backed paramilitary unit in Afghanistan, was one of tens of thousands imported to the United States by the Biden regime, organized by then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Readers will recall that Trump has confronted Islam before. In a January 2017 essay, Executive Order 13769: Its Character and Implications, I argued that, if democracy and liberalism are to prevail, “the state must preserve secular values and practices, and every person who enjoys the blessings of liberty should dedicate himself to ensuring the perpetuation of this state of affairs. A liberal democracy must proceed based on reason.” Therefore, I continued, the conversation about Trump’s actions in 2017 should be grounded in “an understanding of the unique problem Islam presents to human freedom, as well as an examination of the European experience with Muslim immigration.” I noted that “[t]he problem that many on the left fail to consider is the corrosive effects of an ideology antithetical to the values and norms of Western society—government, law, politics, and culture—and the need for a policy that deliberately integrates Muslims with these values and norms, as well as promotes these values in the Islamic world.” I saw in the reaction to Trump’s order “an opportunity to have a broader conversation about Islam and immigration.”
Trump’s actions have Steve Bannon of the podcast War Room embracing the late Christopher Hitchens’ warning about Islam: that the Islamization (or Islamification) of the West is an existential problem. Atheists and liberals have long warned conservatives about the Islamization project, and I think I speak for many of us when I say that we welcome conservatives to the fight. We don’t have much time to turn things around, however, so the more robustly Republicans address the problem, the better (and they’d better put a strategy in place before the 2026 midterm elections). Indeed, America (and the West more broadly) should move aggressively to contain Islam in the same way the West contained communism during the Cold War. Just because Islam calls itself a religion is no reason to throw open the doors of Western civilization to Muslims. After all, as Hutchens noted, it’s not as if communism weren’t also effectively a religion; Islam, a species of clerical fascism, represents no less a threat to the internal security of the nations across the trans-Atlantic space.
I addressed this problem in recent essays (see Defensive Intolerance: Confronting the Existential Threat of Enlightenment’s Antithesis; Revisiting the Paradox of Tolerating Intolerance—The Occasion: The Election of Zohran Mamdani; Human Nature and the Limits of Tolerance: When Relativism Becomes Nihilism), as well as in a May 2019 essay, Threat Minimization and Ecumenical Demobilization. In these essays, I warn the West about the extension of the ecumenical spirit—originally aimed at creating understanding and unity across Christian sects—to fellowship with Muslims. Christianity and Islam are radically different ideological systems, and ignoring this fact prepares populations for what Canadian psychologist Gad Saad identifies as suicidal empathy. This progressive desire is, for many of the rank and file, an instantiation of misguided tolerance. For elites, it is a strategy of denationalism and the managed decline of the West.
Christianity is about charity, love, tolerance, and many other good things. But many Christians have forgotten about or never learned the history of Islamic conquest and the reality that our Christian ancestors took up swords and saved Europe from the fate suffered by the Middle East and North Africa, formerly thriving Christian centers in the world, now primitive hellholes, where women are treated as second class citizens, and the fate of hundreds of millions have fallen into the hands of clerics working from a plagiarism of JudeoChristian texts that twists those scriptures into a totalitarian system. It was Christians, including militant monks, who repelled with violence the Muslim barbarians, drove them from Europe, and secured the future for Christianity. Had they not acted when they did, there would be no Europe. No Europe, no America. No Enlightenment. No human rights. Only clerical fascism. Tragically, modern Christianity has made Nietzsche’s critique of the religion a reality by rejecting the militant side of the faith and suppressing the human instinct for self-preservation (see Republican Virtue and the Unchained Prometheus: The Crossroads of Moral Restraint and the Iron Cage of Rationality).
As I noted in those essays, Muslims have now added to the tactic of military aggression the mass migration of Muslims to the West and the progressive Islamization of the trans-Atlantic space. The tactic of migration is a strategy to conquer the civilized world from within. The softest parts of Christianity, strategically exploited by transnational elites, continue in the progressive attitude that empathizes with Muslims and the barbarian hordes, while rejecting the militancy necessary to repel the existential threat Islam represents to human dignity and freedom. The failure of Westerners to take up both sides of Christianity—the soft (selectively tolerant) and the hard (militant) sides—portends disaster. At the same time, what militancy remains, progressives have aimed at their fellow Westerners. We must not be shy about calling things what they are; the left has become a fifth column in the West, working with our enemies to bring down Western civilization.
Reflecting on this, I have lost confidence in the United Nations and the efficacy of international law to defend freedom and human rights. When the United Nations was founded, it was established on Western values of international cooperation and law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged from this framework. But not all member states endorsed it in substance, even if they formally signed onto it. Moreover, Muslim-majority nations developed their own declarations of rights—most notably the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam—which is founded on Sharia rather than the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to democratic republicanism and human rights. As a result, the UN includes a wide array of states whose commitments to democracy and rights are not aligned with the Western standards that originally shaped the institution. These Western standards are not arbitrary; they are the product of reason in the context of European culture, made possible by the Protestant Reformation and the broader intellectual currents of Christian civilization.
This matters when we consider cases such as Israel (see my recent essay How Did the Roles Get Reversed? The Moral Confusion Surrounding Israel and Gaza, and embedded links). If the UN or its agencies are asked to adjudicate whether Israel is responsible for genocide after the massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023, the judgment would ostensibly rest on the legal definition of genocide—a Western juridical concept. In practice, however, the judgment rendered would be heavily influenced by the political alignments and value systems of states that do not share the underlying philosophical commitments from which those legal definitions arose. Many of these states are openly hostile to Israel and to the West. Perhaps the UN won’t make this determination. But one has reason to worry it will. (And then what?)
When reflecting on this dynamic, it is easy to think of the contrast presented in Star Trek’s construct of the United Federation of Planets. Starfleet included many different species and cultures, but they were all integrated into a framework of shared values rooted in Enlightenment-style principles and liberal norms—equality, reason, tolerance, universalism. Diversity existed, but it was anchored in a common civilizational ethic. In contrast, groups like the Klingons and Romulans, who did not share these principles, remained outside the Federation and were recurring sources of conflict because their worldviews diverged so fundamentally. I raise the matter of a 1960s Sci-fi TV show and its spin-offs because it shaped the beliefs of many Americans who today contemplate the world situation. By portraying such antagonism as occurring out in space, they do not see the Klingons and Romulans as analogs to Muslims.
However, the contemporary terrestrial situation more closely resembles the dark side of that fictional interstellar situation. The real Earth is divided by profoundly different religious and civilizational traditions, and there is no universally accepted philosophical foundation uniting all nations. Had the West colonized the world and brought it to the principles of individualism and secularism, it would be a different matter. Even in its failure to accomplish this, the desire is portrayed as imperial ambition. The UN project to include every state in a single system of international cooperation by tolerating the cultures of barbaric countries and regions has undermined its original purpose. Instead of a mechanism for upholding universal principles, it has become an arena in which illiberal, non-Western, and even totalitarian regimes can leverage their numbers to dilute, reinterpret, or subvert the values the institution was created to advance and defend.
Last night, I revisited an interview conducted with Hitchens (Conversations with History, UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler) in which he expresses optimism about the role of international law in holding member nations to account based on a universal standard of treatment. His argument is similar to arguments advanced by pro-Arab intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who insist on putting Israel’s fate in the United Nations’ hands. However, the validity of their argument depends on a uniformity across the planet of values that align with the underlying principles upon which a just international law must rest. It should be obvious that this is not the case. Given this, one must ask whether justice is what these intellectuals desire or if their sentiments are driven more by a hostility towards the Jewish state.
The reality of the world we live in, with the totalitarian ambitions of China, and its radically different conception of the world, growing more belligerent by the day, and also those of Islam and the rest of the Third World, make such uniformity impossible. The universalism desired by those who established the United Nations and developed further the system of international law presumes the hegemony of the Western worldview. There is no such hegemony. Only in a fantasy world like Star Trek could such a situation exist. At this point, we can’t even count on Europe to uphold the foundational values that support the endeavor. Europe is well into its Islamization phase, and the pessimistic side of me has trouble believing that the continent hasn’t passed the point of no return.
We must therefore ask whether the United Nations is something worth continuing in its present form. How can we allow barbarian cultures and corrupt elements of the West to determine the fate of mankind? At the very least, how can we leave the fate of America to such madness? The situation demands a comprehensive rethink. In the meantime, Trump is doing the right thing: halting mass immigration and reviewing the status of those who have entered our country.
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Because of all the anti-Western and anti-white rhetoric the occasion of Thanksgiving has provoked, I want to close with a couple of historical notes. For it was not just the false claim of “stolen land” that progressives rehearsed (see Gratitude and the Genocide Narrative: Thanksgiving and the Ideology of Historical Responsibility), but the African slave trade. “Never forget,” advocates lecturers. I’ll take them up on that.
First, the Asante (an ethnic group of modern-day Ghana) were deeply involved in the slave trade, particularly from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Readers may remember that Democrats wore the ceremonial garb of the Asante, the Kente cloth, during the BLM riots, a large-scale uprising against the West and white people triggered by the overdose death of convicted felon George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
Second, white Europeans (millions of them) were enslaved in the Barbary States for several centuries. The Muslim slave trade—also called the Arab, Islamic, or Trans-Saharan slave trade—was one of the largest and longest-lasting systems of slavery in world history, spanning over 1,300 years, involving multiple regions and empires, and predating and outlasting the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, slavery continues in the Islamic world. I will say more about the Barbary States, in particular, Tripoli, today an open-air slave market. I will bring these closing remarks to the point about religion and freedom.
During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the United States intervened militarily against the Barbary States—Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis—because these North African regimes sponsored piracy and the enslavement or ransoming of captured American and European sailors. For centuries, Barbary corsairs seized ships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, forcing nations to pay tribute for safe passage. After the American Revolution, the US no longer had British naval protection, and American crews were increasingly captured. Earlier presidents agreed to pay tribute to the Barbary States, but Jefferson believed this was dishonorable and unsustainable.
In 1801, when Tripoli demanded increased payments, Jefferson refused, prompting the ruler of Tripoli to declare war. Jefferson responded by sending the US Navy to the Mediterranean, launching the First Barbary War (1801–1805). The conflict included naval blockades, ship-to-ship battles, and the famous 1804 raid led by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur to destroy the captured USS Philadelphia. The war ultimately forced Tripoli to renounce future tribute demands and release American captives, marking the first major overseas military campaign in US history and establishing America’s willingness to confront piracy and state-sponsored enslavement abroad.
As I noted in a December 2023 essay, Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism, the Treaty of Peace and Amity with Tripoli (1805), which ended the First Barbary War, included a famous clause emphasizing the secular nature of the US government. “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” Article 11 states, “it is declared that there is no hostility on the part of the United States to the laws, religion, or tranquility of Muslims.” This provision was intended to reassure Tripoli that the US, though largely populated by Christians, was not a religiously motivated state and had no intention of spreading Christianity through its foreign policy.
The inclusion of Article 11, however diplomatically strategic, testifies more profoundly to the American principle of separating religion from government, even in international relations, and is often cited as evidence that the US government was officially secular even while its citizens were predominantly Christian. I have invoked this clause many times in my insistence that the United States is not and should not become a theocratic state.
However, America’s adversaries do not advance such a principle; Islamic countries are not secular even while their citizens are predominantly Muslim. If they did, it might be reasonable to tolerate Muslim immigrants, as they would have been socialized in a secular culture that respected other religious faiths (or, in my case, those who have no faith at all). However, as I have explained many times, since humans are culture-bearers, those bearing cultures incompatible with secular ethics are not suited to reside in America. They should therefore be barred from entering the country.
Whether we are a Christian nation is a point reasonable people can debate, but those who believe all laws derive from Islam are a priori unreasonable people. No discussion is possible with such people. Therefore, the rational policy is to keep those animated by irrational cultures from entering and subverting Western institutions.
freedom and reason 