Trump will have the opportunity to replace the late justice Antonin Scalia immediately, and three more justices who will be well into their eighties before the next election, including that destructive, uber-radical feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who will be eighty-seven in 2020.29 Trump could literally pack the Court with conservatives for the next several decades, ensuring at the very least that religious liberty suffers no more setbacks in that forum. There may even be the opportunity to reverse some of the damage.
Trump can also nullify some of Emperor Barry Hussein’s worst executive orders30 which violate religious liberty. But perhaps the most positive impact he can have on restoring religious liberty is simply to refrain from attacking it the way Obama did for eight years. Without an administration directing its attorneys to pursue cases in which religious people are persecuted, there would be far fewer opportunities for spurious rulings.
As I’ve said many times over the decades, a nation is defined by its borders, language, and culture. Trump must build the wall to defend our borders. And he must do everything he can to defend and restore religious liberty, the foundation upon which our culture is built.
SAVAGE SOLUTIONS
The problem isn’t guns, it’s mass shooters armed with radicalism, drugs, and mental issues.
Order public health agencies to conduct unbiased studies on the side effects of psychotropic drugs.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TRUMP’S WAR FOR THE SECOND AMENDMENT
ALL QUIET ON THE GUN CONTROL FRONT—FOR NOW
Two weeks to the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated, we had another tragedy. The story has become all too familiar. A lone gunman walked into a public place, this time in an airport baggage claim area at Fort Lauderdale airport, and opened fire on random, innocent people. Five people were killed and six more injured.1
While the story was sadly familiar, the aftermath was not. After every other random shooting over the past several years, we’ve heard an immediate refrain, led by the president, from every left-wing politician, agitator, and media figure. “We must pass stricter gun control,” they’ve told us, regardless of the reasons for the killing or whether stricter gun control would have prevented it.
This time, we heard nothing of the sort. We didn’t have the usual anti-gun press conference from Obama. He told ABC mouthpiece Georgie-boy Stephanopoulos he was “heartbroken” and that tragedies like this “have happened too often during the eight years I’ve been president.”2 But he didn’t go into his usual script about how innocent Americans who had nothing to do with the shooting should be stripped of their rights. Neither did the media. They were all strangely quiet on the subject. Of course, they did not mention the shooter was motivated by ISIS.
That quiet was the sound of a president and his fake news media who knew their attacks on this basic freedom had just been flatly rejected in the historic election the previous November. The left spent the entire transition period trying to undermine Trump’s presidency before he even took the oath of office. That included hysterical protests, daily reminders that Hillary won the popular vote—at least counting all the illegal immigrants, dead people, and other noneligible voters who pulled a lever for her—and even pathetic attempts to keep Trump from taking office via the Electoral College.
But by January 6, it seemed the shellacking progressivism took from the vast majority of communities in the United States had subdued their zeal for disarming law-abiding citizens, at least for the moment. However, I caution anyone who thinks Trump being inaugurated has ended that fight. You can bet the left will regroup and again espouse the cause Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and so many other tyrants have championed. That is, seizing the people’s weapons. Rendering the populations powerless to resist their tyranny.
Just as I said with Obamacare, it’s not enough for us to win a momentary victory. We must recognize why the left has had success in moving their agenda forward in the first place. Just as most Americans don’t want to see millions of people go without reasonable access to medical care, they also don’t want to see innocent people gunned down in public places. If conservatives don’t come up with a solution, the progressives will. And we know what that will be.
The socialists’ success in gun control employs the same strategy as their success in health care and just about everything else. They seize on a problem, obscure the true cause, set up a straw man cause, and then propose the heavy hand of government as the only possible solution.
That’s what they did with the financial meltdown of 2008, allowing them to pass Dodd-Frank and other wealth-destroying regulations. That’s what they did with the global warming hoax, which gave Obama cover to mute the American oil and coal industries and further deter the general economy. That’s what they did with health care, as I’ve already shown in a previous chapter, and that’s what they want to do with the right to bear arms. When there is a tragedy that leaves well-meaning Americans vulnerable to their arguments, they seize the opportunity. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
In the absence of a recent tragedy, the left’s argument for gun control is absurd on its face. They want us to believe the availability of guns and the sheer number of privately owned firearms are the reasons these tragedies happen, as if the guns themselves were the problem.
A 2016 survey3 by the left-leaning Pew Research Center found that gun ownership by household was up 7 percent over the past two years, to 44 percent of American households. That doesn’t count the 5 percent of households who wouldn’t say whether they owned a gun or not. Regardless, roughly half the population has guns. That’s well over 100 million people.
That means the dozen or so people who committed the tragic crimes the left exploits to disarm us are statistically insignificant. In any kind of argument that cites the sheer number of guns as a determining factor, the number of guns used to commit these crimes is so close to zero that any statistician doing such an analysis would treat them as if they didn’t even exist. What’s 12 shooters divided by 100,000,000?
THE TRUE CAUSES OF MASS SHOOTINGS
The left doesn’t want you to focus on at least one of the real causes of mass shootings: radical Islam. If you haven’t noticed, the majority of mass shootings over the past several years hasn’t been simply by lone nuts who were hearing voices. The three deadliest shootings in this country since Sandy Hook—the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shooting, the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, and the 2016 shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida—have all been carried about by perpetrators connected to radical Islam.
The latter two incidents were publicized as such because the motivation was undeniable. The shooters themselves confirmed they were murdering innocent people in the name of their so-called religion. But I’ll bet you didn’t know Aaron Alexis, the Washington Navy Yard shooter, created a website called “Mohammad Salem.”4 He did. Look it up for yourself. It was buried in the reporting on the incident at the time, but you can still find it if you look for it.
That means that all of the deadliest shootings in America since Sandy Hook were committed by shooters who were either overtly or secretly radical Islamists.
The Obama administration and its left-wing media propaganda machine never missed an opportunity to bury radical Islam when they could. It was no different in January with the Fort Lauderdale shooter, Esteban Santiago Ruiz. The FBI reported it had found no jihadi content on his social media accounts, despite widespread rumors he had expressed jihadi views online.5
I don’t know who was assigned to that case. Maybe it was someone Obama the party animal put in there. But they seemed to have missed that obscure social media platform called Myspace, where Ruiz registered under the name “Aashiq Hammad.”6 His account included pictures of himself in Islamic clothing, recording Islamic music and downloading terrorist propaganda. The alternative media site Got News had all of this one day after the shooting, while the FBI was still trying to determine Ruiz’s motivation weeks later.
Of course, the media had to f
ind some motivation other than radical Islam. We did get a halfhearted attempt to blame guns. Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions called the tragedy a “painful reminder of our nation’s gun violence crisis.”7 The Brady Campaign lashed out at Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), saying “Tell hypocritical politicians to take action and pass life-saving gun laws! We need solutions not more prayers.”8
But the story the media consolidated around was that Ruiz was suffering from PTSD after his experiences in the Iraq War. That’s not an entirely unhelpful conclusion for the gun-grabbing left. If mental illness is part of the reason, they can pass laws saying anyone who is mentally ill is prohibited from owning a gun. And, of course, it will be far-left liberal psychiatrists and psychologists who will determine who is mentally ill, which will be everyone who wants a gun. It’s a little like Catch-22.
There’s only one problem with the official story. Ruiz created his Aashiq Hammad Myspace account in 2007, a full three years before he went to Iraq. So, maybe his mental illness was radical Islam itself. What else can you call the desire to live by the barbaric rules of AD 800, where apostates are beheaded and homosexuals thrown off rooftops?
Self-described former Palestinian terrorist Walid Shoebat says there is clear photo evidence Ruiz was a jihadi sleeper agent.9 Shoebat had pictures of the shooter wearing a kaffiyeh while serving in the army and raising his index finger in a recognizable jihadi gesture. “And if the Nazi has a Seig Heil and cutting their sides of their hair, the Islamist uses the sabbabah (index finger) and lets the beard go while trimming the mustache,”10 wrote Shoebat on the day of the shooting.
Certainly, Ruiz was mentally ill. But the suppression by the media of Ruiz’s obvious jihadi sentiments is just another example of them distracting you from the true causes of tragedies, especially when it’s radical Islam. We suffered under a president who wouldn’t even say those two words together for eight years. But he was always willing to exploit tragedy to push more gun control.
Donald Trump made it absolutely clear in his inauguration speech that the days of covering up for radical Islam were over, at least in the White House. “We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones—and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth,” Trump thundered from the Capitol balcony.11 “Radical Islamic terrorism” reverberated like a cannon shot over the entire nation.
Trump stood firm on protecting the Second Amendment throughout his campaign and these words from his speech confirm he is determined to recognize the true cause of incidents like the one in Fort Lauderdale. To do so you must be willing to say the words. If there is a mass shooting during his tenure, and unfortunately its likely there will be, he must stand firm in saying “radical Islam” instead of “guns” if the perpetrator is another sleeper cell.
WHAT ABOUT THE DRUGS?
Certainly, I don’t mean to imply that every mass shooter is a radical Islamic terrorist. There is no such evidence for the Sandy Hook shooter or many other perpetrators of similar crimes. But do you know what virtually all of them who were not jihadists had in common? They were all taking or had recently been taking psychotropic drugs.12
This goes all the way back to the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, perpetrated by Eric Harris, who was prescribed Zoloft and afterward Luvox, and Dylan Klebold, whose medical records have never been released.13 The list includes Mitchell Scott Johnson and Andrew Douglas Golden, the two schoolboys who perpetrated the deadliest mass shooting at an American middle school; Steven Kazmierczak, who shot twenty-two people at Northern Illinois University, killing five; Asa Coon, who shot five people at a Cleveland high school; and many more.14
The shooters in virtually every high-profile mass shooting were taking or had previously taken drugs whose side effects include suicidal thoughts and/or other violent behavior.15 Yet, after every mass shooting, the media invariably focuses on guns as the chief cause, despite the more than 100 million gun owners who weren’t taking this class of drugs and didn’t kill anyone. Rarely will you see the medications the shooter was taken mentioned other than in passing and sometimes not at all. Never does the media suggest a direct cause-effect relationship between the medications the shooter was taking and his crime.
One of the few exceptions to this was the reporting on Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter. In his case, the media narrative was that Lanza should have been taking psychotropic drugs but his mother had neglected to comply with his psychiatrist.16 And where did the liberal media go with that? That guns must be banned for anyone with mental health issues, that the government must fund more mental health care, and that these dangerous drugs may have prevented the shooting.
As I wrote in an earlier chapter, I’m trained as a scientist. I certainly don’t deny the beneficial effects these drugs can have on people with serious mental illnesses. Perhaps Adam Lanza was someone who should have been taking these medications but wasn’t, although there is some evidence that refutes that narrative.17 It’s certainly an uncontroversial statement that suddenly discontinuing these drugs can lead to erratic or violent behavior, among other side effects.
My main point is that on the days these tragedies occurred, tens of millions of Americans were carrying guns on the streets, into stores, restaurants, and other public places that do not prohibit them, and only one in those tens of millions committed a mass shooting. You don’t have to be a trained scientist to conclude that access to firearms was not the causative factor in the tragedy.
Neither is the mere presence of “mental illness.” That’s a rather expansive term that we should be careful about permitting to work its way into any kind of legislation. There are many, many more people who could be described as suffering from minor mental illnesses who will not commit violence against others because of it. And you can bet your paycheck that if the government is allowed to get an expansive definition of mental illness into gun legislation, the liberal mental health industry will try to diagnose every single gun owner with some sort of mental illness. Perhaps they will invent the term gunophilia!
No, it was not even merely the presence of mental illness that these mass shooters all had in common. It was being treated for mental illness, appropriately or not, with controversial psychotropic drugs.
I’m not suggesting any of the mass shooters were inappropriately prescribed these drugs. There is no way to know one way or another without an intensive study of each of their case histories. But we do know there is widespread concern these drugs are being overprescribed.18 Aside from their relationship to mass shootings, use of this class of drugs also leads to more overdose deaths than heroin.19
What public health agencies like the FDA and NIH should be looking at is whether the inappropriate prescription of these drugs, especially to grammar school–aged boys who are just acting like normal boys, are systematically building more Adam Lanzas and Steven Kazmierczaks. At the very least, logic dictates that the more people who are prescribed with drugs with side effects that include suicidal thoughts and violent behavior, the more violence and suicides we should expect to see.
This is just another reason Trump must restore real science to the public health agencies. This is an area where there is obviously a problem, but not one with an easy solution. Many people need these drugs to live normal, reasonably healthy lives. Yet the drugs’ side effects can be dangerous and there is an undeniable correlation to mass shootings.
The next time someone who has been prescribed these drugs commits a high-profile act of violence, Trump needs to use the bully pulpit to call attention to the real cause. After eight years of solidarity between the president and media against the Second Amendment, Trump must be the first president to say the words “psychotropic drugs,” just as he boldly said “radical Islam” in his inauguration speech.
By telling the truth about these shootings, Trump can kill two birds with one stone: protect the Second Amendment,
and drain that part of the swamp occupied by drug companies getting government cover and subsidies to push dangerous drugs on children who don’t need them.
SAVAGE SOLUTIONS
Study the global agenda of the intelligence community.
Back Trump’s plan to end the new Cold War with Russia.
Learn how to recognize fake news.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TRUMP’S WAR AGAINST THE DEEP STATE
On January 11, President-elect Donald Trump conceded “as far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.”1 It was a significant victory for the Deep State in its all-out war against Trump and everything he represents.
During the same week, the intelligence community, together with its friends in the media, had trumpeted both the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report on Russia hacking the election and the fake news story about Trump’s alleged sexual misbehavior in a Russian hotel in 2013. This is the kind of pressure Trump is going to have to face day in, day out, for the duration of his presidency.
Those of you who regularly listen to my radio show, The Savage Nation, are probably familiar with the term Deep State, but some of you may not be. I know there are millions of people who previously had ignored politics for decades, convinced they would remain forgotten men and women, not caring who won elections. Trump’s victory has brought millions of new enlistees to our fight to save the greatest nation on earth. So, for those newcomers reading this book, I’m going to tell you something about how daunting our task is. As I’ve said throughout, winning an election was only the beginning.
Trump's War Page 18