Those insufficiently attuned to the disastrous consequences of progressive ideology should pay attention to Germany and its feckless chancellor, Angela Merkel. She is running for a fourth term in the 2017 general election, and arguably represents the last gasp for the elitist, nation-state despising, anti-democratic globalist agenda. In short, if she goes, that agenda may be dealt a blow from which it cannot soon recover.

With regard to immigration, Merkel epitomizes the (literally) deadly denialism that forms the heart of progressivism. Merkel allowed more than one million Middle Eastern “refugees” to flood into Germany in 2015. Ever since, the nation has endured a rape epidemic, a skyrocketing “migrant” crime wave, and a series of terror attacks that culminated in the Berlin Christmas market atrocity that killed 12 and injured 48, courtesy of Tunisian national, Anis Amri, who came to Germany during the 2015 rush.

Yet denialism is only half the equation. Amri provides great insight into the other half, as in the progressive determination to erect a firewall around their agenda, using political correctness to do so. Thus it should surprise no one that Amri was not only known to German police, but considered to be one of the most dangerous Islamists in Germany. German investigative files obtained by CNN reveal he had ties to a German-Islamic State recruitment network and had engaged in previous discussions about launching an attack. As a result, German security services put him on a list of “dangerous people.”

When? Last March, more than eight months before the Christmas market attack.

This is not Germany’s first dalliance with what amounts to politically correct suppression of critical information. As the Gatestone Institute reveals, much of the mayhem and death attributed to “migrants” is being “downplayed by German authorities and the media, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.” They are aided and abetted by an equally feckless judiciary, highlighted by a case in which four Serbian teenagers who gang-raped a 14-year-old girl and left her for dead in sub-zero temperatures were given suspended sentences. The judge admitted “the penalties may seem mild to the public,” but he insisted they all confessed, seemed remorseful, and posed no further threat to society.

Merkel has an equally twisted mindset. In her New Year’s address to the nation, she admitted that Islamist terrorism is the biggest test facing her nation. Yet she insisted Germans’ public displays of mourning that followed the Christmas market attack filled her with confidence regarding the country’s future. Even more bizarre, she stated that Germans could fight terror with compassion. “As we go on with our lives and work, we tell the terrorists: You are murderers full of hate, but you will not determine how we live and want to live,” she declared. “We are free, compassionate and open.”

Not exactly. “Security authorities are warning that there is no way to completely remove the threat of terrorism, suggesting no choice but for tight security precautions against terror to become part of everyday life,” CNS reports. “A special law enforcement agency whose brief includes preventive action has already been implementing police checks at stations, airports, football matches and Christmas markets, with officers equipped with machine guns and fire-resistant vests.”

The Washington Post adds the surrenderist element of progressive ideology to the aforementioned odious police-state mix, declaring Islamist efforts in Europe “are pushing counterterrorism authorities to their limits, forcing citizens and their leaders to resign themselves to a new era where attacks may be a fact of life, not an exception.”

As for Merkel herself, her commitment to freedom, compassion and openness is belied by the reality she is surrounded by armed guards 24/7, and travels in a bullet-proof automobile. Such are the critical facts of life that separate the elites and their magnanimous beliefs from ordinary Germans, more aptly described as “soft targets.”

Why focus on Merkel? Because she is an object lesson for an incoming Trump administration. For the last eight years, America has endured an Obama administration with exactly the same mindset as Merkel’s, if not worse. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy aptly explains the bankruptcy of the American Left’s denialism, noting that we are in both a shooting war with jihadists and an ideological war with sharia supremacists. The latter group wages war “at the negotiating table, in the councils of government, in the media, on the campus, in the courtroom — at every political and cultural pressure point.” To defeat these efforts, he adds, “it is necessary to discredit the ideology that catalyzes them.”

Which ideology is that? According to McCarthy, the audience for which sharia supremacism must be discredited “is not Western.” That is undoubtedly true, but it puts the proverbial cart before the horse. As Merkel — and Obama, Kerry, Clinton and an ever-radicalizing Democrat Party reveal, progressives ideologues wallowing in their multiculturalist fantasies are every bit as problematic as the most dedicated jihadist. If Western jihadist enablers are not taken to task with as much well-deserved vitriol as the Islamists themselves, these de facto Fifth Columnists will continue abiding “acceptable” levels of Islamic terror within their own nations. And America itself will be the next nation where terror becomes the norm, not the exception.

All of this is worth remembering when the Leftmedia in the United States and the EU go all out to warn people against the rising tide of “right wing extremism” and the dangers of “nationalism” and “populism.” It is nothing less than a transparently despicable effort to conflate peoples’ legitimate desires for discreet borders, controllable immigration, national sovereignty and manifest destiny with Nazism, fascism, xenophobia and racism. And as it has been so amply demonstrated, Merkel, et al, prefer the confidence building that arises from “after the atrocity” mourning, to the hard and less “enlightened” work of preventing cultural suicide.

Fortunately, there is every indication Donald Trump understands that compassion does not shield people from the blast of a bomb, the blizzard of bullets from automatic weapons, or speeding 32 ton trucks. Whether Germans, other EU citizens, and American social justice warriors share those same inclinations remains to be seen. One suspects most people prefer living with leftist accusations of nativism, etc., than living with the “normalcy” of terror — or dying an untimely death. Yet it is precisely the latter two choices leftists require to elicit their admiration.

Thanks, but no thanks, Angela.