The Patriot Post® · America's Greatest Test Is Here

The heat has been gradually increasing in the American melting pot for almost a century.

Resisting communism after WWII ended, America began to feel the heat of the challenge, ironically during the “Cold War,” with its nuclear threat, duck and cover, and blockade of Cuba. We engaged in proxy wars against the Red threat around the globe, eventually even escalating to a “hot” war with Chinese proxies in Vietnam.

But because we fought them “over there,” distance shielded us. The northwestern hemisphere seemed isolated, protected, and safe.

Then the threat subtly shifted, and the heat increased to a simmer with the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979. But because those events were intermittent, brief, and apparently unsustainable, we treated each as unconnected rather than as intentional, sustained campaigns — as if someone had accidentally bumped the dial on the cooktop.

Over the next 22 years, the spread of communism faded away, replaced by another we don’t understand well enough to fight: the global terrorism of radical Islam. While we understood communism to be antithetical to our Constitution, economy, governance, and society, this new enemy insurgency was protected by our interpretation of our First Amendment — that our government must put all religions on equal footing and never show favor or disfavor to any religion.

In the process, we forgot Karl Popper’s warning: that an infinitely tolerant society will always be overcome by intolerance.

That simmer has now turned into a rolling boil.

And the steam led to a romance between enemies old and new. After a torrid affair and united by mutual hate for America, capitalists, Christians, and Jews, the communists and radical Islamists got married.

For a while, the steam hid the offspring of that marriage — a metastasized militant movement of hard-core communists and Islamists within the Democrat Party bearing the DNA of Stalin and Mao combined with that of Hasan al Banna and Osama bin Laden.

Twenty-five years since the fall of the Twin Towers, America will meet that anniversary with a Muslim mayor of New York who was born in Uganda, a Hamas-supporting Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate from Michigan, and communist-leaning Democratic Socialists of America candidates across America winning primary elections. The loudest voices in the room are Islamists like Hasan Piker, who celebrated 10/7 and claims that America deserved 9/11, and the DSA leadership, who want to abolish the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, prisons, law enforcement, and our borders.

Think about that for a moment.

Talk about taking a hard left turn.

After years of chasing, bin Laden was finally rendered to room temperature, but not before he left an important message to the enemies of America behind. Forget trying to force your way through the front door because no power on earth can break it down. But around back, the door isn’t just unlocked — it’s standing wide open.

Our Founders didn’t include protective measures in our founding because, quite frankly, the founding of America incorporated its reason for existing in its core mission: the pursuit of maximum individual liberty, something in extremely short supply in the world of 1776. I’ve read thousands of their letters and writings over the years, and one thing stands out: They believed a nation founded on life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, and self-governance would be so revered that no one would want to destroy it.

They contemplated that such a structure built for, in the words of John Adams, “a moral and religious people” could bring about bonds of unity and common purpose strong enough to withstand any challenge and defeat any enemy.

We didn’t have to believe all the same things or live the same ways; the only common ask of the American people was to defend the Constitution and their fellow citizens against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Popular culture, aided by postmodernist globalism and deconstructionism, has adopted the idea that everything is equally permissible. But as the French philosopher Albert Camus said, just because everything is permissible doesn’t mean nothing is forbidden.

Some things, especially those antithetical to America’s stated values, must remain forbidden, and that forbiddance must be enforced. There is a line. There is a choice.

We may welcome many to our shores, but if we are to survive, we must discriminate. We have no obligation to invite or tolerate our enemies or those who aid them.

We can no longer meet open, obvious threats and warfare with a collective sigh and a whispered “Oh, well. Who are we to judge?” unless, of course, we want that for an epitaph.

We must not abide radical Islamism or communism — or those who practice either — especially when they openly state their goal is the destruction of our Republic and the American way of life.

These are the people and movements that have mistaken our tolerance for acceptance.

We have all heard it said that our Constitution is not a suicide pact. While that is true, it also does not mandate dismissing threats and blind tolerance of the intolerant.

If we so choose to use them, we have the necessary weapons to prevent murder by insurgent assassins without compromising our own liberty.

Absolute victory over our enemies is the only way to turn the heat down.