re: "Criminal ideologies"

Col. B. Bunny at Eternity Road ("Freedom Commandos -- and there is no finer species") discussed some of America's existential threats.

Money quote(s):

"We didn’t ban the Communist party, but we should have. Freedom of Religion is absolute, but it does exist on the assumption that the religion in question is not a criminal ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States. And that is exactly what Islam, like Nazism or Communism is.

Freedom of Religion was meant to protect religious freedom, not protect religious terrorism."

"The solicitude of the Soviet Union for greater voter registration and equality of educational opportunity here apparently motivated it to expend large sums of money inside our borders. To downplay their altruism, those crazy guys used Armand “the Bag Man” Hammer to transfer those sums secretly to the Communist Party of the US.A. (Note that this is a fact one mentioned publicly at great personal peril when Mr. Hammer was still alive.) Too, that they were a bunch of murderous thugs hostile to all that America stands for was something that they thought Americans in their parochial view of things would not appreciate."

"The idea that domestic communists weren’t committed to the overthrow of the U.S. is ridiculous now and was then. To call yourself a communist at any time is to associate yourself with an ideology of dictatorship, subjugation, summary execution, and judicial murder—the reality of every communist regime that ever was. No amount of naivete or willful blindness can excuse that association. To pretend that communism was something benign and “progressive” was an exercise in protective coloration."

&

"Think death for apostasy, shariah supplanting the Constitution, rule by ignorant priests, male supremacy, subjugation of women, implacable hostility to rational thought, war against and subjugation of infidels everywhere, destruction of Christian churches and the Christian religion itself, and execution of infidels unwilling to live as dhimmis in their own land, just to name a few things off the top of my head.

So, yes. Criminal ideologies.

Best obliterated, expelled, or quarantined."

re: "Leftist cognitive virulence."

Col. B. Bunny at Eternity Road does not think it's cognitive dissonance.

Money quote(s):

"In the 20th century, the world stood knee deep in a lake of blood filled by every manner of leftist policy and inherent excess—revenge; torture; exploitation; starvation; the elevation of psychopaths (Che), drunks, and peasants; subversion (Armand Hammer); assassination; execution; organ harvesting; concentration camps; aggressive war; arbitrary justice; subservient courts; sponsorship of terrorism; diplomatic support for cretins and monsters; and pursuit of ideas of human nature and economics that would have been laughable if they hadn’t been pathetic and murderous.

But this was, from the beginning, invisible to leftists. They were convinced that the highest human good was (a) to support any unanchored freaks who could fit the words “brotherhood,” “justice,” or “capitalist pig” into every second sentence and (b) to pull down any structure erected by our ancestors to encourage the triumph of reason, to transmit knowledge, to encourage free inquiry, to restrain arbitrary government, and to liberate women and the poor from bonds both legal, customary, and economic. "