Increasingly, it seems that those who are most likely to lecture anyone within earshot about what the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria supposedly wants are those who are least likely to base that assessment in anything objective. Some of the nation’s most prominent Democratic politicians and commentators have appropriated the ISIS menace and converted it into a vehicle to advance their own grievances. Most engage in this fatuous solipsism not because they do not understand the nature of radical Islamic terrorism, although some don’t. For the left, this is a practice that obscures their own failures, confirms the prudence of their own myopia, and projects the impression that their preoccupations are those of a serious thinker rather than an obsessive.

At President Barack Obama’s year-end press conference last Friday, those hoping for some assurance that the administration had finally wrapped its hands around the ISIS threat were disappointed. The president insisted unconvincingly that the modest bombing campaign was running out of targets, that ISIS was being sufficiently squeezed on all sides already, and that there was virtually no way to prevent ISIS-inspired radicals from carrying out the occasional mass casualty attack in the West. Obama was, however, adamant about one step he could take to fight ISIS further: closing Guantanamo Bay.

“Guantanamo continues to be one of the key magnets for jihadi recruitment,” Obama insisted. “[T]his is part of what they feed, this notion of a gross injustice, that America is not living up to its professed ideals. We know that. We see the Internet traffic. We see how Guantanamo has been used to create this mythology that America is at war with Islam.”

If the metric the president uses to measure the effect that this detention facility has on ISIS recruitment and radicalization is “internet traffic,” this is an assertion that will be hard to contradict. The notion that Guantanamo Bay serves as an ISIS propaganda tool is not, however, especially well supported by actual ISIS propaganda. Long War Journal’s Thomas Joscelyn, a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, found the president’s claim dubious. “We follow ISIS propaganda on a day-to-day basis. No evidence that Guantanamo is a major recruiting tool. Other themes dominate,” he noted. “I found only 4 mentions of Guantanamo in 12 issues of ISIS’ Dabiq mag. 4 mentions in 750+ pages. None in recruiting context.” Indeed, the wish that Guantanamo Bay might serve as an ISIS recruiting tool often becomes father to the thought. “Will Guantanamo Bay Force Feeding Videos Become ISIS Propaganda?” Newsweek’s Lauren Walker asked breathlessly last year. She was perhaps disappointed to learn that an involuntarily broken hunger strike at the prison did not make ISIS’s highlight reel.

Democrats have been agitating against Guantanamo Bay since before the September 11th attacks. The notion that this prison facility is counterproductive for U.S. interests abroad is a conclusion in search of a supporting rationale.

Another questionable ISIS recruiting tool was exposed last weekend by Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter,” Clinton said of Donald Trump. “They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.” Just as is the case with Guantanamo Bay, there is no evidence to support this contention. Not yet, at least. Team Clinton’s embarrassing efforts to defend the former secretary’s comments demonstrate that clearly.

A figure who does appear in an ISIS recruiting video, however, might explain Clinton’s efforts to muddy the waters. In the heavily produced ISIS propaganda video “No Respite” released on November 24, the narrator speaking in English refers to Bill Clinton as one of the West’s “fornicators” against whom ISIS is fighting. To acknowledge this would be to take ISIS at its word; they fight against secularism, against free sexual association, and against liberalism, classically defined. This truth is often dismissed by the left as a shallow understanding of the factors motivating ISIS followers. The reality, we are told by self-assured liberals, is that ISIS is not born out of an ideological commitment to fundamentalist Islam as much as it was by a great drought in Syria caused by climate change.

If America were serious about anti-ISIS propaganda, it would not be drawing attention to the stories of individual ISIS fighters who die what radicals consider a martyr’s death on the battlefield but promoting the freedom in the West to use tobacco products. ISIS’s authoritarian ban on smoking is deeply unpopular inside the “caliphate,” and it exposes the terrorist organization’s internal contradictions like little else. Punishments for tobacco use range from beheading for the unconnected to a light slap on the wrist for those few with the skills necessary to help manage the revolutionary state’s affairs. The ban has even been lifted in restive territories temporarily occupied by ISIS where the militant organization was seeking to ingratiate itself with the locals. In some territories, ISIS militants themselves dominate the black market and sell illicit tobacco products at inflated rates, highlighting the “Islamic caliphate’s” duplicity. Western propagandists might make use of this information, but it would also contradict anti-smoking programs in the West. The left would not want to sacrifice the nobility of public health initiatives merely to rob the Islamic State of its claim to piety.

Of course, ISIS’s best recruiting tool is its ability to take and hold territory by force from governments it sees as aligned with heretical powers – an Iranian vassal in Damascus and the tributes of Washington in Baghdad. A territory the size of Great Britain was taken and secured by ISIS right under Barack Obama’s nose, and for the left to acknowledge that would be an admission of failure. Another source of strength for Raqqa is ISIS’s burgeoning ability to execute and inspire terror attacks overseas. In the space of just over a year, more than 1,000 civilians lost their lives as a result of Islamic State-directed or inspired attacks. As the fluid borders of the “caliphate” are increasingly sealed, those aspiring militants who would hope to join ISIS’s ranks in Syria and Iraq are likely to find that an impossible task. They will be tempted to display their loyalty to the cause in suicide missions in their home countries. If they are successful, as was the couple who pulled off the worst act of radical Islamic terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11 in San Bernardino, the Islamic State’s recruitment efforts will get another boost. It is a vicious cycle to which Democrats have resigned themselves with their only policy response being the desire to restrict the right of Americans to own firearms.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the left is convinced ISIS is fixated on precisely the issues that serve as their preoccupations. That’s not a comforting thought, but it isn’t especially surprising. A political movement that refuses to call the enemy by its name is one that is committed to a delusion. Until the left gets serious about what actually inspires fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, they cannot be trusted to defeat them.